France launches 9GW offshore wind tender

[dan_b]

Looks like France wants to get serious with offshore wind.

https://renews.biz/96509/france-unveils ... re-tender/

[Swwils]

This will be a tough sell.

[dan_b]

Why?

[Swwils]

Fecamp is a tricky location, you need massive mills to meet any reasonable CfD, besides, if they lose 2 or 3 say to anchor incidents like previously they ruin any immortalised cost of the entire project.

French in general more smart with the true value of the energy generated.

[dan_b]

The winds in the English Channel are pretty decent though its not like we haven't planted a fair few turbines in that stretch of offshore waters ourselves? When you say massive, are the current gen of 14-16MW turbines not big enough?

And why should losing 2 turbines in an entire farm jeopardise the whole concept of offshore wind for an entire nation?

What does "French in general more smart with the true value of the energy generated" actually mean?

[Swwils]

Some of our farms don't reach the CfD even before they have finished building them, this is highly problematic as you are stuck with very expensive electricity. No those turbines are not big enough to create a output cost low enough to be worthwhile.

Losing an anchor sparks a review of the whole installation and you end up with a cost to fix to that - which completely fubars any value proposition to the energy created, sometimes for other sites also. You can't just shovel money down a black hole, your partner's, especially those lower down the chain like manufutuers need to make money. If it costs too much you have to stop, fundamentally this is why there will be low interest from developers; who are in the business of financial sense.

Long gone french minds decided, almost without permission, to build out nuclear... Of which they are still benefiting from today enabling them to have electrical space heating, an extremely robust distribution grid, among other things. Even with bonkers strikes and an absolute load of regulation they run well and put out loads of cheap cheap energy.

For context, I looked at the desnz rate for H1 2024...£160.5/MWh for CfD offshore wind. Which is like £97 above market rate. Last year RO contracts got a £116/MWh top-up. This is properly expensive.

I am not here to push you one way or a other, but just to report costs and state that I do think expensive electricity is very bad for civilization. Which hopefully is not controversial.

[Mart]

French nuclear effectively went bust, and had to taken over by the Gov.

It looks like they plan to scale nuclear down at least 50%, with the statement that they intend to build 'upto' 14 new reactors. Which at roughly twice the capacity of current reactors, would, if they do decide to build them all (they most likely won't), mean a halving of French nuclear capacity.

The latest CfD contract issued for off-shore wind was at ~£60/MWh. {HPC was issued at £89.50.]

[Swwils]

That is not the strike price CfD for floating. It's not even what we currently pay.

https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/datase ... -emissions

[GarethC]

5.2GW of floating sounds a lot and a high proportion of the auction. Isn't the current total installed capacity of floating wind turbines globally only in the hundreds of megawatts or something?

[Mart]

5.2GW of floating sounds a lot and a high proportion of the auction. Isn't the current total installed capacity of floating wind turbines globally only in the hundreds of megawatts or something?

Yes, very early days.

For instance, in the last UK auction, when 3.4GW of capacity was issued to off-shore wind at ~£60/MWh, CfD's for 'floaters' were issued at £140/MWh for 0.4GW of capacity.

But, worth remembering that the early off-shore wind CfD's were ~£150/MWh before they fell rapidly as the technology was deployed/developed. Reaching as low as ~£37/MWh in the CfD round 4 auction, before the Ukraine/gas price/inflation spike hit the industry disproportionately hard (and of course, as (almost) all of us know, caused the large spike in UK leccy prices.)

Similarly dramatic results were seen with the many international FiT schemes (primarily led by Germany and Italy), that helped to massively reduce the cost of PV, making it the cheapest form of generation, ever.

Floaters have the benefit of potentially achieving higher cf's than fixed bottom WT's, and could work extremely well in the Med, but it's early days, and we'll need to see if their pluses, outweigh their negatives, leading to low(er) generation costs.