RVO receives several bids for subsidy-free Hollandse Kust Noord offshore wind farm

The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) closed the application period for the Hollandse Kust (noord) Wind Farm Zone tender on 30 April. Several developers have applied for a permit to build and operate an offshore wind farm in the zone without a government subsidy.

RVO will now assess the applications and announce the winner of the permit by the end of July.

The Dutch government opened the tender on Thursday, 2 April. The developers are competing for a permit to construct an offshore wind farm of at least 700 MW of capacity, whose electricity production will not be subsidized by the state.

The Hollandse Kust (noord) zone consists of two sites located 18.5 kilometres off the west coast of the Netherlands. The two sites will accommodate an offshore wind capacity of between 693 MW and 760 MW in total.

RVO did not disclose which companies submitted their bids at the tender.

At the end of April, Ørsted revealed it would participate in the Hollandse Kust (noord) tender.

Vattenfall, which won the permits at the first two subsidy-free tenders in the Netherlands, informed at the beginning of the month that it decided not to participate in the tender, citing uncertainty over the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason.

The Hollandse Kust (noord) is one of three offshore wind areas chosen by the Dutch government to be developed by 2023, as part of the country’s Energy Agreement for sustainable growth: Borssele, Hollandse Kust (zuid) and Hollandse Kust (noord).

This tender is the fifth in a series of tenders that will see around 11 GW of installed offshore wind capacity in 2030.

In 2016, the first sites in the Borssele Wind Farm Zone were tendered and won by Ørsted. The Borssele 1 & 2 offshore wind farm supplied power for the first time via TenneT’s offshore grid on 28 April.

At the end of December 2016, the Blauwwind consortium (Partners Group, Shell, DGE, Eneco Group and Van Oord) won the tender to build the Borssele 3 & 4 offshore wind farm. Van Oord installed the final wind turbine foundation at the Borssele 3 & 4 offshore wind site in April.

The Borssele V site has been designated as a demonstration site for offshore wind innovations. Two Towers consortium, comprising Van Oord, Investri Offshore and Green Giraffe, won the Borssele V tender in 2018. The consortium is developing a two-turbine 19 MW wind farm that will use oyster seabeds as forms of erosion protection. Grid connection for Borssele V is scheduled for 2021.

The non-subsidized offshore wind farms Vattenfall is developing in the Netherlands are the Hollandse Kust (zuid) 1 and 2 and the Hollandse Kust (zuid) 3 and 4, for which the developer won the permits in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Construction of the wind farms in the Hollandse Kust (zuid) zone will start in 2022. As some of the wind farms will be located within territorial waters, Vattenfall will pay approximately € 2 million per year for the right of superficies, according to RVO.