Press releases

The German Foundation for OFFSHORE WINDENERGY and its partners BWE, BWO, VDMA and WAB e.V. presented the annual status report of offshore wind energy development in Germany today. According to the report, no new installations of offshore wind energy took place in the second half of 2020. In total, 1,501 turbines with a capacity of 7,770 MW deliver clean, safe and cost-effective electricity from the sea to the mainland. In the eyes of the industry, it is important to enable the tendering of potentially usable areas  as soon as possible to enable earlier construction activities and thus preserve existing innovation potential, employment and the value chain in Germany. Furthermore, the report emphasized that the positive market dynamics invoked by the EU strategy for renewable offshore energy need to be utilized in order to trigger an investment push.

The EU-funded Horizon2020 project ‘Progress on Meshed HVDC Offshore Transmission Networks’ (PROMOTioN) presented its research results at a final online conference today. The event, titled ‘North Sea Grid for the European Green Deal: How to unlock Europe's Offshore Wind potential - a deployment plan for a meshed HVDC grid’, marks the culmination of over four years of practice-oriented research and full-scale technology demonstrations on integrated offshore HVDC transmission grids by 34 international project partners who represent the whole industry value chain.

As forecast at the beginning of the year, only 32 offshore wind turbines with a capacity of 219 MW were connected to the German grid in the first half of 2020. This figure corresponds to around 11 percent of the installed capacity of 2 GW that the domestic value chain implemented in 2015.

A core objective of the PROMOTioN project is the investigation and demonstration of operation and control of HVDC networks as well as their interaction with offshore wind power plants. While previous work packages of the project, i.e. WP2, WP3 and WP4, focused on simulation-based investigations regarding the challenges associated with the control and protection of future MTDC networks and the connected offshore wind power plants, WP16 continuous their analysis using a laboratory-scaled MTDC demonstrator in a power-hardware-in-the-loop environment.

In view of the current discussions on the future refinancing of offshore wind energy projects, the Offshore Wind Energy Foundation calls for the creation of framework conditions for the secure refinancing of future offshore wind projects.

A full-scale prototype of the ABB hybrid HVDC circuit breaker was successfully tested on the 27th of February 2020 in the independent KEMA Laboratories as part of the PROMOTioN HVDC technology demonstration programme. The EU-funded PROMOTioN project aims to tackle technical, regulatory, financial and legal challenges to the implementation of meshed HVDC offshore transmission networks.

Countries around the North Sea need to implement a harmonized regulatory and economic framework to fully exploit the potential of a meshed offshore grid in the North Sea. This is a key conclusion of the EU-funded research project PROMOTioN (Progress on Offshore Meshed HVDC Transmission Networks).

Bremerhaven/Berlin, 9 October 2019 - At the invitation of Lower Saxony's Environment Minister Olaf Lies, the northern states, representatives of the federal government and industry met on 7 October in Hanover for a joint conference on the future of the offshore wind industry. Olaf Lies explained that there is a great need for action after the German government had set clear goals in motion with the climate package. This need for action is acute from the point of view of WAB and the Offshore Wind Energy Foundation.

The German OFFSHORE WINDENERGIE Foundation welcomes the decision of the Climate Cabinet on Friday to increase the expansion targets for offshore wind energy to 20 GW by 2030: "Increasing the expansion targets is an important signal for climate and industrial policy. In this way, additional jobs can be created while protecting the climate at the same time," said Andreas Wagner, managing director of the foundation.