Germany will need to find new areas to develop offshore wind capacity if the sector is to deliver 3GW to produce green hydrogen under the country’s national strategy for the gas, according to a group of the country’s renewable energy organisations.
The groups – BWE, BWO, VDMA, WAB and the German Offshore Wind Energy Foundation – welcomed the ramp-up in the domestic market as laid down in the National Hydrogen Strategy (NWS) and underlined that offshore wind energy has a key role to play in this.
But, as the NWS opens up the opportunity to use about 3GW of offshore wind energy to produce green hydrogen, “additional areas must be pre-investigated and put out to tender as quickly as possible”, they said.
They noted that in the preliminary draft of the area development plan, the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency has named the first two sites for Power-to-X in the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
“The award procedure for these areas should begin in 2021. Here, too, an incentive system with efficient levy and redistribution mechanisms must be developed to bring about a rapid market ramp-up for green hydrogen in Germany,” they added.
The groups also warned that Germany’s offshore wind sector is in the middle of an “expansion gap” that must be kept as “small as possible” with only 219MW of new capacity added in the first half of 2020.
They said 32 turbines were connected to the grid in the first six months of the year, which corresponds to around 11% of the installed capacity of 2GW that the domestic value chain implemented in 2015.
In total, 1501 turbines totalling 7.76GW are supplying offshore wind energy to the German grid, they said citing Deutsche WindGuard data.
This means that the Federal Government’s expansion target for 2020 has already been achieved in the first half of the year, they added.
The organisations said: “Not least because of the long planning time of offshore wind farms, we have long warned that an expansion gap is imminent. We are now in the middle of it.
“The challenge now is to keep this expansion gap as small as possible and to strengthen the domestic market for offshore wind energy sustainably and permanently.
“In addition to anchoring the long-term goals in law, this also includes putting the available areas out to tender as quickly as possible and choosing an economically efficient remuneration system for future offshore wind projects.”
This should be created quickly after the summer break and in dialogue with the industry, the groups added.
Germany will set in law after the summer a target of 20GW by 2030 and 40GW by 2040 for offshore wind.