EUR 30 Billion Contracts by TenneT for 60 GW North Sea Offshore Wind Plans

The Netherlands based transmission system giant TenneT, Hitachi Energy/Petrofac and the three consortium partnerships GE/Sembcorp (SMOP), GE/McDermott and Siemens Energy/Dragados have signed contracts in Berlin, Germany, to seal Europe’s largest-ever tender award for energy transition infrastructure. The total volume of the contracts for the components of the 14 systems amounts to around €30 billion.  The contracts follow the agreement between Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands or the Esbjerg Declaration at the North Sea Energy Summit in May 2022, when they agreed to jointly install a capacity of at least 65 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy by 2030. TenneT, which is Europe’s leading offshore transmission system operator, is to provide around two-thirds of this volume, or 40 GW of grid connections.

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. 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 have been added. These 14 systems are to be realised by 2031.

Their “core components”, meaning the innovative two-gigawatt 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. TenneT said that with a contract of this magnitude, Europe will be taking a global lead.

Tim Meyerjürgens, COO of TenneT, said, “As the leading offshore transmission system operator in the EU, we have the know-how needed to make Europe’s goal of securing an independent supply of renewable energies a reality. To achieve this, the North Sea must be developed as Europe’s green power house and quickly connected to the electricity grids on land. We are acting and investing accordingly.”

He said that 2 GW Program of TenneT will help make green wind energy from the North Sea scalable and more cost-efficient – while continuing to minimise any impacts on the environment.

Niklas Persson, Executive VP, Hitachi Energy, said, “Innovative business models, based on agile collaboration, standardization and synergies be-tween projects, are the key enablers of this change – along with HVDC technology that we have pioneered and developed over the last 70 years.”