SSE & Statoil Buy Out Statkraft Stake In 4.8 Gigawatt Dogger Bank
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Norway’s Statoil and Britain’s SSE have both acquired an additional stake in the Dogger Bank Offshore Wind development site, in the North Sea off the east coast of England, which has a potential generating capacity of up to 4,800 megawatts.
Statoil, a Norwegian multinational oil and gas company, and SSE, a British energy company, announced last week that they had both increased their individual stakes in the Dogger Bank Offshore Wind development site by 12.5% — acquired from original consortium partner, Norway’s hydropower company Statkraft. This brings the owning consortium down to three partners — SSE and Statoil, both of which now own 37.5% stake in the project, and German energy company Innogy, which retains its original 25% stake.
“Dogger Bank represents a unique opportunity for the UK to develop secure, sustainable and cost-competitive energy from its world-class wind resource,” said Stephen Bull, Statoil’s senior vice president for offshore wind. “By increasing our share, we strengthen Statoil’s long-term portfolio materiality and gain additional optionality. This is in line with our strategy to gradually complement Statoil’s oil and gas portfolio with profitable renewable energy and other low-carbon solutions.”
“This acquisition represents the next step in the development of the Dogger Bank Offshore Wind development, SSE will continue to work alongside the remaining partners in the Forewind consortium to progress these projects,” added Mike Seaton, Director of Development (Wholesale) SSE.
Both companies, in their press releases, describe the Dogger Bank Offshore Wind site as comprising four separate projects being developed by their consortium, granted planning permission during 2015. Located in the North Sea off the coast of England, the wind farms have a potential generating capacity of up to 4,800 megawatts (MW), or 4.8 gigawatts (GW). Of course, this is well down on the original expectation from the Dogger Bank plans originally put forward several years ago, which at the time envisioned up to 9 GW. In early 2014 this was decreased to 7.2 GW across the whole site, only to apparently have been dropped further by February 2015 — when one of the four sites, the Dogger Bank Creyke Beck site, was intended to be 2.4 GW.
The saga continued a few months later, when in August the Forewind consortium announced planning consent for the Dogger Bank Teesside A & B, with a combined 2.4 GW. Only a few days later, however, Forewind announced it was backing away from developing Dogger Bank Teesside C & D, which would have added a further 2.4 GW.
What we are left with, then, is four separate projects, each of which is 1.2 GW in size — Dogger Bank Creyke Beck A & B and Dogger Bank Teesside A & B. In the end, it all works out, but the road to here has been a bumpy one.
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