In the last decade, floating offshore wind (FOW) technology has developed rapidly.
So there will be significant industry interest in Ƶ Government’s recently published budget for the 4th allocation round of its ‘Contracts for Difference’ programme - which ringfences £24m of support for FOW projects between FYs 2025/6 and 2028/9.
While this will be encouraging for domestic investment, FOW is also evolving rapidly internationally – with Spain, France, and Norway among those with significant plans to deploy FOW at scale.
Welsh Government sees FOW as an enabler for net zero which can also deliver high-quality sustainable employment and export opportunities.
And the Celtic Sea is one of the areas of the Ƶ which has richest promise.
According to the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, around 5GW of FOW could be deployable in the Celtic Sea by 2040.
Furthermore, in a report published today at a FOW conference being held in Aberdeen, the Floating Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence (FoW CoE), suggests over half the Ƶ’s required 100GW of offshore wind by 2050 could be floating – delivering £43.6bn in Ƶ gross value add (GVA) and creating nearly 30,000 jobs.
This leads to another debate around ensuring ‘early’ FOW projects give local supply chains a head start to get ready for the larger scale projects which will follow.
By capitalising on naturally existing clusters and providing sector leadership, green growth industries can ‘learn on the job’ and acquire competitive advantage during the commercialisation phase.
With their existing attributes, South Wales, the South West of England and south of Ireland form a natural cluster but don’t currently possess the infrastructure and strategic supply chain capability to deliver large scale (or even intermediate scale) floating offshore wind farms.
Action is needed to reduce reliance on projects being ‘towed in’, delivering less local benefit.
Blue Gem Wind (BGW) is a joint venture between TotalEnergies and Simply Blue Group. BGW is developing two FOW projects in the Celtic Sea.
For the smaller ‘Erebus’ project (96MW, 44KMs off the Pembrokeshire coast) an independent study for BGW found local content could amount to 56% of lifetime project expenditure if a Ƶ based ports strategy were pursued, compared to 32% without local port infrastructure.
Using local ports could also deliver between 2 and 2.5 times GVA(£m) for the project capital expenditure element and create approximately 50% more jobs.
So, what needs to happen?
Different areas of the Ƶ have different opportunities and challenges associated with infrastructure and supply chain.
With its distinct oil & gas legacy, Scotland is comparatively advanced to accommodate ‘green growth’ portside industrial activity.
But given the sheer scale of longer-term opportunity, no one area of the Ƶ is more or less ‘strategic’ than another.
However, understanding future offshore wind deployment scenarios is important when considering what infrastructure and supply chain capability needs to be developed, where and when.
For example, the recent £75m Ƶ Government investment in ABLE Marine Park (Humber) unlocked more than £260m in private investment in the co-located monopile manufacturing facility and £78m from investment in a co-located wind turbine tower factory.
A short to medium-term programme of strategic infrastructure and supply chain investment needs to be delivered on a ‘horses for courses’ basis, with a specific focus on FOW and with clear stepping stones to future commercial scale projects in the Celtic Sea and elsewhere in the Ƶ.
This requires the highest degree of co-operation between developers, supply chain and Governments and with due regard to other users of the marine environment.
Only through such industry ‘master-planning’ will the Celtic Sea and the rest of the Ƶ achieve the benefits from FOW which are undoubtedly within its grasp.
