Ørsted and Nestlé Sign15-Year Offshore Wind PPA

Nestlé UK has signed a 15-year PPA with Ørsted to buy green power output worth 31 MW from the 573 MW Race Bank Offshore Wind Farm.

 

Nestlé UK, the UK subsidiary of one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, Nestlé, has signed a 15-year indexed fixed-price power purchase agreement (PPA) with Ørsted, the world leader in offshore wind, to buy green power from the Race Bank Offshore Wind Farm. Nestlé UK will buy the output of 31 MW of the offshore wind farm’s 573 MW total capacity, making it Ørsted’s largest fixed-price corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) in the UK.

From 1 May 2020, Nestlé UK will start purchasing 125 GWh of green power per year to cover 50 percent of its power consumption. The agreement, along with its already existing PPAs, secures that all of the firms’ consumption is covered by PPAs from renewable energy backed by certificates. For Ørsted, it stabilises revenues for Ørsted’s Race Bank Offshore Wind Farm and reduces merchant power price exposure across the portfolio.

Stefano Agostini, CEO of Nestlé UK and Ireland, said “I’m incredibly proud that at Nestlé we are doing the right thing to play our part in reducing climate change. With our partnership with Ørsted, we are now able to cover 100 percent of our electricity from wind power, another huge milestone in our efforts to become a sustainable business.”

The Race Bank Offshore Wind Farm is one of the newest operational wind farms in the UK and was commissioned in 2018. It is capable of generating up to 573 MW of green electricity from its 91 Siemens Gamesa 6 MW wind turbines.

Rasmus Errboe, Senior Vice President and responsible for corporate PPAs at Ørsted Offshore, said “we’re very happy to enter into this long-term agreement with Nestlé and support them to achieve their sustainability ambitions. Large corporations are increasingly taking climate action by sourcing green power, thereby making important contributions to the demand for renewable energy. Today’s announcement with Nestlé UK demonstrates offshore wind’s attractiveness as a reliable, large-scale source of green power and underlines Ørsted’s ambition to continue to be a leader within corporate PPAs for offshore wind.”

In December 2019, Ørsted signed the world’s largest PPA for offshore wind with Covestro for 100 MW of the output from the Borkum Riffgrund 3 project in Germany. The corporate PPA with Nestlé UK is Ørsted’s second in the UK, following the 23 MW agreement with Northumbrian Water, signed in February 2019.