ScotWind Round 1 bid results

Crown Estate Scotland has today released the results of the ScotWind offshore wind leasing round. The successful developers have now been offered Option Agreements on the sites and will need to sign these off in the next few weeks to cement their place in the next phase of offshore wind development in Scotland.

The round was expected to deliver up to 10GW of offshore wind in Scottish waters and was hotly contested with 74 bids on the 15 sites from major international companies and consortia from around the world. The actual capacity of the round far exceeded expectations with nearly 25GW of projects on 14 of the sites and with almost 60% of the projects being floating offshore wind (14.57GW) 

The map below details the 17 new sites (2 sites have multiple projects and one, NE1 off Shetland, had no successful bidders) and the list shows the successful developers on each site along with the scale of each development in Megawatts. The floating wind projects are highlighted in bold.

The scale of the floating wind projects in this ScotWind 1 round will make Scotland one of the largest markets in the world for this emerging technology and offers the potential for a large proportion of the components for these wind farms to be manufactured in Scotland. Some of the successful bidders have already made announcements during the months and weeks leading up to today's result about the scale of their support for the supply chain in Scotland. The supply chain companies will now be looking for signals from these developers on what form this support will take over the coming years required to now deliver these projects of scale.

The Scottish Government has already committed to further ScotWind rounds in the next few years and a special round aimed at assisting the oil and gas sector in the North Sea is already underway. This Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas (INTOG) round could add a further 4GW of projects to the Scottish pipeline and a further announcement from Crown Estate Scotland on this new round is expected to follow shortly. This would consist of mostly floating wind projects and, along with the ScotWind 1 floating projects announced today, will create the largest floating offshore wind market in the world with up to 18.5GW of projects capable of being delivered over the next decade.