Gordon Brown to reveal £100 billion wind project winners

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown will confirm this week the winners of the auction to construct the country’s next giant offshore wind farms to deliver over 25GW of renewable energy. The prime minister is planned to attend the awarding ceremony at an Exeter occassion and will talk on the economic benefits of the £100 billion project.

The Sunday Times reported earlier that a consortium – which includes Scottish and Southern Energy, RWE Npower, and Norwegian companies Statkraft and StatoilHydro – is expected to win the bid to build the largest site,  the Dogger Bank zone, which is located 110kms off the eastern coast of the country and expected to generate 10GW of power.

The newspaper further stated that EDP and Sea Energy are likely to get the Moray Firth site in Scotland, while Vattenfall and Scottish Power are frontrunners to develop a 5GW wind farm off the Norfolk coast. Meanwhile, energy giants Centrica and E.ON, and wind energy expert Mainstream Renewables are believed to have made successful bids as well.

Construction work will likely to start in 2014, with the UK government confident that the wind farm projects will be finished by 2020. The scheme will make a key contribution to the country’s target of producing 15 per cent of its electricity requirement from renewable sources by the end of 2020.

Meanwhile, worries remain on the ability of energy groups to finish the wind farms on schedule. Many of the earlier smaller projects, such as the development of London Array, had been held back by technical and grant issues.

However, the British Wind Energy Association is confident that the required grants for the projects can be easily raised, as long as the UK government maintains high level of financial backing for the wind industry.