The UK’s Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC) has extended delivery dates for all Contracts for Difference Round 3 projects by six months due to previous uncertainty caused by a judicial review.
The LCCC, the designated counterparty to all CfD contracts in the UK, announced in a bulletin today that Milestone Delivery Dates, the end of each target commissioning window, and longstop dates will all be extended by six months.
A further extension may be granted where developers can provide evidence that the judicial review brought by Banks Group over the third CfD allocation round caused delays longer than six months, LCCC said.
Banks took BEIS to court over the exclusion of onshore wind and solar from the allocation round, withdrawing its case at the last minute in March after the UK government department agreed to re-include the technologies in the CfDs from next year and to pay the company’s legal expenses.
The legal action had drawn a question mark over whether contracts signed by successful winners in the auction, which included a number of major offshore wind farms, would be honoured.
In October last year, offshore wind projects totalling 5.5MW signed CfDs offered in the UK’s third round allocation, together with four remote island wind farms with combined capacity of over 274MW and 34MW of advanced conversion technologies.
The offshore wind projects are SSE and Equinor’s 1.2GW each Dogger Bank A,B and C, SSE’s 454MW Seagreen 1, Innogy’s 1.4GW Sofia and the 12MW Forthwind demo.
Remote island wind projects are the 189MW Muaitheabhal, 16.32MW Costa Head, 49.5MW Druim Leathann and 20.4MW Hesta Head developments.