Press releases

Berlin/Bremerhaven/Frankfurt, 15 July 2021 – For the first time in more than ten years, there will be no expansion of offshore wind energy in Germany this year. This expansion gap is not the expression of a lack of interest on the part of investors or a lack of strength on the part of the industry, but a consequence of political decisions, the effects of which are now becoming visible for the offshore wind industry in Germany. This development can only be counteracted by raising the expansion targets for offshore wind energy, retaining skilled workers, and concretising expansion plans for green hydrogen.

The German Foundation OFFSHORE WINDENERGY and its cooperation partner the World Forum offshore Wind (WFO) launched a project at the beginning of January funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) to provide export support for German companies in the offshore wind energy sector.

Today, the German Foundation OFFSHORE WINDENERGY received the funding decision from the Lower Saxony Ministry for the Environment, Energy, Construction and Climate Protection for the project "Green Hydrogen and Offshore Wind Energy" at a virtual handover. In the future, this project will be dedicated to the implementation of the North German and National Hydrogen Strategy and thus promote the development of a domestic hydrogen economy.

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.