Northland Power also plans to exercise its preemptive ‘legal entry right’ in Germany’s offshore wind tender for a 433MW zone in the North Sea, potentially making the auction much less competitive.

German grid agency BNetzA on Friday had launched a tendering round for 958MW in grid-connection capacity across three areas in the North and Baltic Seas, at a maximum support price of €73 ($88) per megawatt hour.

Spanish utility Iberdrola earlier this week had already told Recharge it plans to exercise its legal entry right for a 300MW zone in the Baltic Sea (after seeing the outcome of the auction), meaning the company can snap away the area from whoever would have won the auction otherwise by matching the winning bid.

The rule was introduced as a compensation for companies that had incurred dozens of millions of euros in development costs for an area, but still didn't win with that project in the 2017 or 2018 auctions for pre-developed zones.

Iberdrola has such a preemptive right for the O-1.3 zone now entering the auction, which it had pre-developed as Windanker. Northland power has the legal entry right for the N-3.8 zone, or Nordsee Two, in which it bought an 85% stake from German utility RWE in 2014.

“Like Iberdrola, we expect that we will exercise our legal entry right,” Northland Power’s managing director for development in Europe, Nigel Slater, told Recharge.

'Synergies and efficiencies'

If both Northland Power and Iberdrola go ahead and exercise their legal entry right at this year’s German offshore wind auction, real competition will be limited to the N-3.7 zone in the North Sea, which according to the grids agency has a capacity for a 225MW wind farm.

Minority stakeholder in the Nordsee Two area, RWE, declined to comment.

Slater added that the Northland-RWE consortium also has pre-developed the 420MW N-3.5 area in the North Sea, which is scheduled to be auctioned off in 2023.

“We and RWE should get a similar entry right there, and are already planning how we can win synergies and efficiencies from N2 [Nordsee Two] and N3 [Nordsee Three], and also Nordsee One [N1],” he said.

“N1 is located directly in the vicinity of N2 and N3, and is already in operation and also owned by Northland and RWE.”

This year’s offshore wind tender is part of a series of auctions through 2025 that will add 10.8GW in wind capacity in the German parts of the North and Baltic Seas, in order to push the country’s offshore wind capacity in operation to more than 20GW by 2030.

Wind

Northland Power also plans use of 'entry right' to claim German offshore auction win