Back in 2017, there was great excitement among environmentalists and the media, when it was announced that two offshore windfarms had bid remarkably low prices into the government’s Contracts for Difference auction, offering to supply electricity to the grid for around half the price that had been seen in earlier auctions.
How had this remarkable change in the economics of offshore wind power been achieved? Nobody really knew for sure, although eco-minded correspondents in the mainstream media were insistent that the change was real.
In a paper published shortly afterward, Gordon Hughes et al. pointed out that there was little evidence that the costs of offshore wind farms were falling at all.
Indeed, they were generally rising, as developers moved into deeper waters in search of more reliable wind speeds. Even discounting factors like this, like-for-like costs seemed to be only falling slightly.
There was absolutely no sign of revolutionary change. Defenders of the green orthodoxy argued that the Hughes analysis was backward-looking, and couldn’t take into account technological advances (although they never said clearly what these were).
In contrast, Hughes’ theory, outlined in a later paper, is that the low CfD bids are in essence a gamble on future electricity prices.
He thinks that the developers are hoping that electricity prices will be so high by the time the windfarms come on stream in 2022 that they will be able to walk away from their CfDs and take the market price instead.
There would be only small contractual penalties for doing so. Hughes et al. have continued to argue that the cost of offshore wind power remains very high to this day.
Recently, some more hard evidence appeared showing that Hughes is correct. One of the low-bidding windfarms published its latest financial accounts, and these allow us to get a feel for whether the cost reductions are real.
Moray East is a 100-turbine, 950MW behemoth that is currently under development off the Scottish coast. The developers have said that it will cost £2.6 billion to build, although this figure comes with caveats.
It almost certainly doesn’t include the offshore transmission assets that the company has to build and the sell back to the grid. Moreover, announced costs for wind farms are invariably understated.
Hughes thinks that the ultimate cost will be somewhere around £3.8 billion. If the wind farm is to make a profit at around £60/MWh, its costs need to be less than half that level (on an optimistic assumption about how much electricity it will generate) and more realistically a third of it.
As at the year-end (31 December 2019), Moray East was still in the early phases of development. The foundations were not quite complete, and the transmission assets were under construction, but far from finished.
Ducting for some of the cables had been completed. How much would we expect the company to have spent thus far?
I used the cost breakdown analysis published here to work out the percentage of total cost represented by each of the main components.
I then applied these, and a guesstimate of how complete each component was, together with Hughes’ £3.8 billion total to come up with an expectation.
The answer: just over £1 billion.
And the actual spending so far? £1.2 billion.
It seems almost unarguable therefore that this is a £3.8 billion wind farm, not a £1.9 million one (which is what it would have to be profitable under the CfD, even making the most generous assumptions about the capacity factor that it might achieve).
It could be argued that my guesstimates are wildly wrong, but think about it in another way. To make a profit at £60/MWh, Moray East’s capital cost must be well below £1.9 billion.
The only way it can do this is to complete the rest of the capital works – including the turbines themselves – for £0.7 billion. This isn’t going to happen.
Electricity is either going to become very, very expensive, or certain investors in the offshore wind business are going to lose their shirts.
Paper: WHO’S THE PATSY? Offshore wind’s high-stakes poker game
Read more at The GWPF
Those things are a hazard to Sea Birds more of a hazard then plastics dumped in the oceans by Africa and Asia
“,,,or certain investors in the offshore wind business are going to lose their shirts.”
Let’s hope it is this, and they are not bailed out by governments that are so willing to spend our hard-earned money on fly-by-night wasteful projects.