Nearly 15GW of floating wind farms could be installed off the coast of Scotland, along with nearly 10GW of fixed turbines, if projects bid into the ScotWind leasing round all delivered.
Crown Estate Scotland announced that 17 projects have been selected from 74 applications, and have now been offered option agreements which reserve the rights to specific areas of seabed. Among the partners joining consortia were oil and gas majors Total Energies, BP and Shell. Download full list of partners ScotWind list.
The average price for a seabed lease to build offshore wind farms fell just short of £100k per square kilometre and the £700M revenue will be passed to the Scottish Government.
The projects now have to pass through consenting, financing and planning stages. Responsibility for these stages does not sit with Crown Estate Scotland, and projects will only progress to a full seabed lease once all these various planning stages have been completed. Crown Estate Scotland said that if any application does not progress to signing a full agreement, the next highest scoring application will instead be offered an option.
Andrew Jamieson, chief executive of Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, said: “The results of this first Scotwind auction are huge. 25GW of offshore wind, or almost two and a half times more than the total so far deployed in all UK waters, demonstrates extraordinary ambition and could make a seismic, positive shift in Scotland’s journey to Net Zero. It presents a once in a generation opportunity for Scottish innovation to come to the fore and drive economic and supply chain growth and job creation.
“That such a significant portion of the anticipated new projects should be floating wind positions us at the global forefront of this transformative new technology, and ORE Catapult very much looks forward to working closely with the potential industrial participants, the Scottish Government and Crown Estate Scotland to realise the massive opportunity.”
Melainie Onn,Deputy Chief Executive, RenewableUK, said: “ScotWind represents one of the country’s biggest ever steps towards net zero. To put this landmark into context, the 25 gigawatts of new capacity announced today is two and a half times the UK’s entire current offshore wind capacity. It’s also equal to the entire current operational offshore wind capacity for the whole of Europe. It will scale up our ability to slash emissions exponentially. In the long term, it will also help to reduce the UK’s vulnerability to international gas prices which are hurting consumers.

“Overall it’s a massive economic boost for the whole country at just the right time. These projects will attract billions of pounds from private investors, which will create thousands of skilled jobs and allow us to maximise supply chain opportunities all around the UK. It also underlines the need to speed up the planning process, so that we can connect these offshore wind farms faster across the UK to meet our targets for 2030 and beyond”.

“It’s highly significant that 60% of the new capacity announced today is for floating offshore wind projects. This will secure the UK’s lead in innovative floating wind, generating enormous amounts of power from the best wind resources in Europe, as well as creating opportunities for us to export our cutting-edge technology worldwide”.