Source Energie and Galileo have entered into a long-term joint development venture, named Source Galileo, with a plan to develop over 5GW of offshore and onshore renewable energy and storage projects in Ireland, Norway, and the UK.
On the offshore side of the business, development activities have been well underway since early 2021 on several maritime areas capable of hosting offshore wind projects located in Irish, Norwegian and UK waters.
The offshore projects aim to deploy both fixed and floating foundations and will be substantially further from shore than many of the offshore wind projects built so far in Europe.
The size of projects in the pipeline is slated to be between 500MW and 2000MW of capacity, which is in line with indications from The Crown Estate in the UK, as well as from Irish and Norwegian governments.
The offshore wind projects will export energy either as electricity directly to electricity grids or as green hydrogen, which can be piped to shore or stored and released to provide dispatchable green energy supply.
On the onshore side of the JV, an initial pipeline of solar PV and storage projects of approximately 1000MW has already been established across the UK.
These onshore projects are expected to provide electricity to the grid in the UK either via direct injection or via energy storage batteries.
Source Energie chief executive Kevin Lynch said: “We are pleased that our already existing partnership with Galileo has evolved into a dedicated joint venture, which will allow us to develop and invest in these exciting and challenging projects.
“We are confident that our joint venture is well positioned to make a large economic and energy contribution to the European energy transition.”
Ingmar Wilhelm, chief executive of Galileo added: “The joint venture is founded on a highly capable team of experienced renewable energy developers and project builders providing access to unique project opportunities in their home markets: Kevin Lynch, Torben Andersen, Garrett Morrison and Fintan Whelan.
“The complementary strengths of Source Energie and Galileo make us very confident for the next phase of expansion of our joint business, in the context of energy supply across Europe requiring larger volumes from renewables, higher levels of energy independence and better price affordability.”