Nine European offshore wind developers – Dong Energy, EnBW, E.On, Iberdrola, RWE, SSE, Statkraft, Statoil and Vattenfall – have signed up to to collectively invest at least £6.4 million to bring the cost of offshore wind below £100 per MWh by 2020. The initiative is part of the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerater (OWA) and a further £1.5 million has been provided by the Scottish Government.

Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, said: “Over the last five years the cost of energy from offshore wind has decreased significantly, largely driven by a combination of innovation, risk reduction and increased deployment rates. But we need to continue building on this success by getting the right solutions into market quickly to put offshore wind on the path to cost competitiveness by 2020.
“…The Scottish Government’s £1.5m investment into the programme, alongside nine of the biggest developers in Europe, shows there is real confidence in the ability of the OWA to continue to deliver cost reductions. We hope this will enable us to leverage further public and private investment into the programme, so our cost reduction ambitions for this important sector can be surpassed.”

Over the last eight years the OWA has delivered over 125 projects, such as ; developing and demonstrating new foundations; the development and adoption of 66kV cabling; improving wind resource measurement and modelling, and new innovative access vessels.

Following a record year for installations in 2015 the European Wind Energy Association estimates that over 20GW of offshore wind will be deployed in Europe by 2020.