Renewable Energy

Partners ink $33B worth of offshore wind system contracts

April 20, 2023

Europe’s largest contracting package for security of supply, the energy transition and climate protection has been launched.

Offshore staff

TenneT, the Hitachi Energy/Petrofac cooperation and the three consortium partnerships GE/Sembcorp (SMOP), GE/McDermott and Siemens Energy/Dragados have signed the contracts in Berlin to seal Europe’s largest tender award for energy transition infrastructure.

The total volume of the contracts for the components of the 14 systems amounts to about €30 billion ($32.8 billion). The result will be a transmission capacity of offshore wind energy in the German and Dutch North Sea that will generate as much electricity as 28 large-scale power plants.

TenneT awarded onshore and offshore converter stations and HVDC technology with a total capacity of 22 GW in late March.

TenneT has thereby completed the process of awarding contracts for the sea- and land-based converter stations for a total of 14 offshore grid connection systems, which was launched in August 2022. TenneT had already awarded 11 of these systems at the end of March, eight of them in the Netherlands and three in Germany. Three more systems in Germany were added April 20.

These 14 systems are to be realized by 2031. Their “core components,” meaning the 2-GW technology for converting alternating current into direct current and back, will be manufactured exclusively at European production sites of the consortiums’ members in all projects.

McDermott stated, "With a contract of this magnitude, Europe will be taking a global lead—in terms of both technology and production—in a key sector of tomorrow’s energy supply."

04.20.2023