2024-02-06 10:30:54
Thanks to ambitious development policies and a highly structured industrial sector, offshore wind farms are multiplying in Europe. The year 2023 was particularly productive, with +4.2 GW. France, lagging behind its neighbors, is just starting to take off.
The year 2023 brought a happy wind to Europe in the offshore wind sector. The Old Continent saw the installation of 4.2 GW of new installations along its coasts, including 3 GW for the countries alone. of the European Union. The European federation of wind energy professionals, Wind Europe, welcomed these additional capacities having greatly exceeded those of 2022, which were respectively 2.5 GW and 0.9 GW. In comparison, 14 GW of onshore wind turbines were installed in the European Union in 2023. The total wind farm installed in the EU is 220 GW, including around twenty for offshore wind.
The European Union’s objective is to increase offshore wind capacity to 60 GW in 2030 and to 300 GW in 2050. The pace of construction of new parks must therefore accelerate. At the end of 2023, the European Commission took action a pack of 15 measures moving in this direction, and the players in the sector have signed a charter to facilitate projects with the majority of Member States, 21 of them having specifically announced their development objectives. A context that seems buoyant, especially as machines continue to progress, resulting in particular in an increase in the load factor for new installations of 50% for offshore wind power and 30-48% for onshore wind power. . Wind Europe is nevertheless attentive to the real conditions of calls for tenders, adversely affected by the rise in inflation. It also ensures that the Net Zero Industry Act does not disrupt the current situation: it provides that a minimum share (20%) of European markets be supplied by European products. If this makes sense for industrial sectors with high imports, it has no reason to exist for the European wind sector where almost all the wind turbines installed are manufactured in Europe (250 factories, 300,000 jobs in total in the sector ).
Very large parks
The countries that have carried the most upward momentum in 2023 are the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France. Off the Dutch coast, the largest offshore wind farm in the world was inaugurated, named Hollandse Kust Zuid, with a power of 1,529 MW, the equivalent of an EPR! Built by the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, it is made up of 139 wind turbines from Siemens Gamesa, with a unit power of 11 MW. Spread over four plots representing a total area of 115 km2, at a distance of 18 to 36 km from the earth, they were installed in just two years. Without subsidies, electricity will be sold directly on the markets or to manufacturers (BSF, Air Liquide) under long-term contracts.
The United Kingdom already has 14.7 GW of offshore wind in service and plans to reach 50 GW in 2030. Faced with inflation, it has increased the ceiling price of calls for tenders from 44 to 73 £/MWh[1], which put around ten projects back on track which might total 10 new gigawatts. The Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm alone, planned north-east of Norwich, would become the largest in the world with 231 wind turbines totaling 2.9 GW.
France, for its part, has finally seen the first wind turbines emerge from its first parks. After that of Fécamp in 2022 (480 MW), it is those of Saint-Brieuc and Fécamp which began to produce electricity in 2023. Still under construction, they must reach 496 MW for the first and 497 MW for the second. In Fécamp, for example, more than half of the 71 wind turbines are installed, of 7 MW each, and the others should be installed in spring 2024. Nine other projects are underway on the north and west coasts of France (see carte). In the Mediterranean, the objective is to favor floating wind power, a technology already being tested with the Faraman pilot farm where three floating wind turbines were installed in 2023, for a total of 23 MW. Two other pilot sites are under construction in Gruissan (30 MW) and Leucate-Le Barcarès (30 MW) for commissioning planned for this year. Two commercial projects of 250 MW each are currently being put out to tender.
The French objective is to have 45 GW of offshore wind power in 2050. To the ten gigawatts already in development or identified, an additional fifteen must be added within 10 years, and the rest therefollowing. An acceleration is necessary, especially when we see that the first parks came out of the sea more than 11 years following the first calls for tenders… And recent progress should not make us forget that France is behind on these objectives of renewable electricity, like the recent barometer of Observ’ER, Ademe and FNCCR confirmed this.
[1] with the exchange rate of 0.8526, as of February 2, 2024 according to the Banque de France, €1=£0.8526, this makes, translated into euros, a jump from €51.6 to €85.6/MWh.
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