Dong Closes Onshore Activities to Focus on Offshore

DONG Energy has today agreed to divest its shareholding in the Swedish onshore wind farm Storrun and Thursday last week the company divested its shareholding in the Norwegian onshore development company Zephyr.

This marks the divestment of DONG Energy’s last onshore wind activities.

As regards the 30MW onshore wind farm Storrun in Sweden, which has been in operation since September 2009, DONG Energy has sold its 80 per cent ownership share to the Australian pension fund Prime Super. The Norwegian based onshore development company, Zephyr, in which DONG Energy had a 33 per cent ownership share, has been divested to the three existing Norwegian co-shareholder which are Østfold Energi, Vardar and Energiselskapet Buskerud.

Last year DONG Energy announced that going forward the company will focus its wind power activities on the offshore market where DONG Energy has a market leading position having installed approximately one third of the offshore wind farms in Europe.

Samuel Leupold, Executive Vice President for DONG Energy Wind Power, said the following about the company’s focus on offshore wind power going forward:

“Today, offshore wind is the fastest growing renewable energy technology in Europe, and it’s within offshore wind that DONG Energy has its key competences. Until now, we’ve installed more than 2,500MW offshore wind power capacity and we’re determined to install another 4,000MW by 2020,” and Leupold continued:

“We’re fully committed to build new offshore wind farms to support the transition of our energy supply in a greener direction. Therefore, I’m very pleased with the fact that we’ve now divested our last onshore wind activities so that we can focus entirely on this considerable task.”

Most recently DONG Energy received consent from DECC in the UK for the Hornsea 1 project with a total capacity of up 1.2GW. The two other projects in the UK where DONG Energy has also received consent are Burbo Bank Extension with a total capacity of up to 258MW and the Walney Extension totalling up to 660MW.

DONG Energy is currently constructing Westermost Rough in the United Kingdom with a total capacity of 210MW as well as Borkum Riffgrund 1 and Gode Wind 1+2 in Germany with a total capacity of 894MW. Upon completion of these projects, DONG Energy will have installed a total capacity of approximately 3,600MW in the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark.

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Press release; Image: dongenergy