Vattenfall believes it can maintain healthy margins on future offshore wind farms, despite the continuing downward pressure on the levelised cost of energy in the sector.
“Tough competition and a more mature market position have definitely an influence on margins,” said the company’s Business Area Wind head Gunnar Groebler in an interview published on Vattenfall’s website. “However our margins are still industry standard and healthy.”
Groebler said larger turbines have been a strong driver in bringing down costs, while the tendering process for offshore wind farms is “forcing everybody to rethink how to operate a wind farm much more efficiently”.
He admitted the company was disappointed to miss out on the tender for the 680MW Borssele 3 and 4 offshore wind farm in the Netherlands, which went to a consortium of Shell, Van Oord, Eneco and Mitsubishi/Diamond Generating Europe.
“That definitely hurt, especially for those who had worked with the tender of course,” Groebler said.
But, he said, “competition spurs you and the fact that we didn’t win the Borssele auction in July last year created a lot of energy and efforts … to further cut our costs for the next projects.”
Vattenfall has filled its pipelines for the upcoming German auctions – the first one in the spring – and the company aims to be successful. “If not, we will have a second chance in 2018,” Groebler said.
He added that the company was “working hard” on ways to come up with viable onshore projects in UK, despite the removal of subsidies.
“My belief is that we will be able to find projects in subsidy free conditions,” he said. “For onshore this may happen towards the end of this decade while for offshore it will take a little longer.”
Groebler added that Vattenfall remains on track to double its wind power capacity to around 4GW in 2020.
Image: Vattenfall
Competition ‘spurs’ Vattenfall
Wind head Gunnar Groebler disappointed to miss out on Borssele 3&4
By EBS