Crown Estate Scotland has announced the outcome of its application process for ScotWind Leasing, the first Scottish offshore wind leasing round in over a decade and the first ever since the management of offshore wind rights were devolved to Scotland.
The results coming just months after Glasgow hosted the global COP26 climate conference show the huge opportunity that Scotland has to transform its energy market and move towards a net zero economy.
Highlights include:
- 17 projects have been selected out of a total of 74 applications, and have now been offered option agreements which reserve the rights to specific areas of seabed
- A total of just under £700m will be paid by the successful applicants in option fees and passed to the Scottish Government for public spending
- The area of seabed covered by the 17 projects is just over 7,000km2 (a maximum of 8,600km2 was made available through the Scottish Government’s Sectoral Marine Plan)
- Initial indications suggest a multi-billion pound supply chain investment in Scotland
- The potential power generated will provide for the expanding electrification of the Scottish economy as we move to net zero.
- The details of the 17 applicants who have been offered option agreements can be found below and in the downloads section.
| Map reference | Lead applicant | Option Fees | Technology | Total capacity (MW) |
| 1 | BP Alternative Energy Investments | £85,900,000 | Fixed | 2,907 |
| 2 | SSE Renewables | £85,900,000 | Floating | 2,610 |
| 3 | Falck Renewables | £28,000,000 | Floating | 1,200 |
| 4 | Shell New Energies | £86,000,000 | Floating | 2,000 |
| 5 | Vattenfall | £20,000,000 | Floating | 798 |
| 6 | DEME | £18,700,000 | Fixed | 1,008 |
| 7 | DEME | £20,000,000 | Floating | 1,008 |
| 8 | Falck Renewables | £25,600,000 | Floating | 1,000 |
| 9 | Ocean Winds | £42,900,000 | Fixed | 1,000 |
| 10 | Falck Renewables | £13,400,000 | Floating | 500 |
| 11 | Scottish Power Renewables | £68,400,000 | Floating | 3,000 |
| 12 | BayWa | £33,000,000 | Floating | 960 |
| 13 | Offshore Wind Power | £65,700,000 | Fixed | 2,000 |
| 14 | Northland Power | £3,900,000 | Floating | 1,500 |
| 15 | Magnora | £10,300,000 | Mixed | 495 |
| 16 | Northland Power | £16,100,000 | Fixed | 840 |
| 17 | Scottish Power Renewables | £75,400,000 | Fixed | 2,000 |
| Totals | £699,200,000 | 24,826 |
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Simon Hodge, Chief Executive of Crown Estate Scotland, said: “Today’s results are a fantastic vote of confidence in Scotland’s ability to transform our energy sector. Just a couple of months after hosting COP26, we’ve now taken a major step towards powering our future economy with renewable electricity.
“In addition to the environmental benefits, this also represents a major investment in the Scottish economy, with around £700m being delivered straight into the public finances and billions of pounds worth of supply chain commitments.
“The variety and scale of the projects that will progress onto the next stages shows both the remarkable progress of the offshore wind sector, and a clear sign that Scotland is set to be a major hub for the further development of this technology in the years to come.”
Should any application not progress to signing a full agreement, the next highest scoring application will instead be offered an option.
Once these agreements are officially signed, the details of the supply chain commitments made by the applicants as part of their Supply Chain Development Statements will be published.
This is just the first stage of the long process these projects will have to go through before we see turbines going into the water, as the projects evolve through consenting, financing, and planning stages.
Responsibility for these stages does not sit with Crown Estate Scotland, and projects will only progress to a full seabed lease once all these various planning stages have been completed.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has welcomed the “truly historic” opportunity for Scotland’s net zero economy, as the winners of the ScotWind offshore wind leasing auction were announced by Crown Estate Scotland yesterday.
17 projects, with a combined potential generating capacity of 25GW, have been offered the rights to specific areas of the seabed for the development of offshore wind power – with developers giving commitments to invest in the Scottish supply chain, providing opportunities for high quality green jobs for decades to come.
The projects are expected to secure at least £1bn in supply chain investment for every 1GW of capacity proposed. They will also generate around £700 million in revenue for the Scottish Government and represent the world’s first commercial scale opportunity for floating offshore wind.
As well as helping complete Scotland’s own journey to net zero, creating thousands of jobs in the process, our offshore wind resource also has the potential to position Scotland as a major exporter of renewable energy, including green hydrogen.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: ““The scale of opportunity here is truly historic. ScotWind puts Scotland at the forefront of the global development of offshore wind, represents a massive step forward in our transition to net zero, and will help deliver the supply chain investments and high quality jobs that will make the climate transition a fair one.
“It allows us to make huge progress in decarbonising our energy supply – vital if we are to reduce Scotland’s emissions – while securing investment in the Scottish supply chain of at least £1 billion for every gigawatt of power.
This will be transformational. And because Scotland’s workers are superbly placed with transferable skills to capitalise on the transition to new energy sources, we have every reason to be optimistic about the number of jobs that can be created.
“That means, for example, that people working right now in the oil and gas sector in the North East of Scotland can be confident of opportunities for their future. The spread of projects across our waters promises economic benefits for communities the length and breadth of the country, ensuring Scotland benefits directly from the revolution in energy generation that is coming.
“The scale of opportunity represented in today’s announcement exceeds our current planning assumption of 10GW of offshore wind – which is a massive vote of confidence in Scotland. So we will now embark on the rigorous consenting process required to make sure we can maximise the potential that clearly exists in offshore wind while also ensuring that the impacts of large scale development – including on other marine users and the wider natural environment – are properly understood and addressed.
“While it is not yet possible to say with certainty what the scale of development will ultimately be, there is no doubt that the scale of this opportunity is transformational – both for our environment and the economy.”
The Falck Renewables and BlueFloat Energy partnership taking part in the current ScotWind offshore wind leasing round is celebrating the success of three of its bids to secure seabed leases for sites which lend themselves to the deployment of large-scale floating wind technology in Scotland.
Two of the partnership’s proposed projects – a site east of Aberdeen in Plan Option E1 and a site north of Fraserburgh in Plan Option NE6 have been granted leases from Crown Estate Scotland – along with a proposed site east of Caithness in Plan Option NE3 which will be developed by a consortium of Falck Renewables, BlueFloat Energy and Ørsted.
The three areas could accommodate a total of approximately 3.0 GW of offshore wind capacity with the projects scheduled to be operational by the end of the decade, subject to securing consent, commercial arrangements and grid connections.
The successful bids combined BlueFloat Energy’s knowledge and experience in developing, financing and executing offshore wind projects with Falck Renewables’ strong track record of global project development and over 15 years of community engagement in Scotland.
Carlos Martin, CEO of BlueFloat Energy, said: “The Scottish coastline is ideal for developing offshore wind projects and our team is thrilled to be given the opportunity to deploy our expertise to deliver these projects in Scotland.
“The potential for boosting the economy and reinforcing Scotland’s position at the forefront of the energy transition is huge. We have already carried out extensive work on mapping out the Scottish supply chain and now look forward to ensuring we work with as many local companies as possible.”
Toni Volpe, CEO of Falck Renewables, said: “We are delighted that our applications have won the support of Crown Estate Scotland and that our offshore wind projects will be making a considerable contribution to providing Scotland with clean energy.
“Falck Renewables has a worldwide renewables portfolio and with our growth strategy we are on track to facilitate the global transition to a low carbon future.”
Richard Dibley, Managing Director of Falck Renewables Wind Ltd, said: “We are hugely excited about the positive impact these projects will have on the whole of Scotland in terms of creating jobs, economic benefit and helping to achieve a net zero future.
“Over the past 15 years we have seen communities empowered with the help of the financial support they have received from our onshore wind farms and we look forward to sharing the benefits of offshore wind with local communities.”
The Falck Renewables, BlueFloat Energy, Ørsted consortium has already begun work with community ownership experts Energy4All on a new framework which will allow residents of Scotland and Scottish communities to share the financial benefits of the offshore wind energy projects the consortium plans to build in the future.
As part of the preparatory work to deliver the offshore wind projects the consortium will collaborate with Energy Skills Partnership Scotland (ESP) to help train up a skilled workforce in time for construction to begin.
Research will also be carried out with the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) to investigate the potential effects of floating offshore wind developments on the marine environment. Projects under discussion will examine how fishing interests and offshore wind can work together and study the interaction of fish, marine mammals and seabirds with floating offshore wind farms.
Energy4All is a non-profit distributing co-operative social enterprise formed by the Baywind Energy Co-operative in 2002 to enable more communities to own and operate renewable energy projects.
Marna McMillin, Chief Executive of Energy4All, said: “Climate breakdown is the key environmental challenge facing our society. If we are to successfully decarbonize our economy, we must rapidly replace polluting fossil fuels with clean power. This requires us to generate much more zero carbon electricity to heat our homes and power our vehicles.
“We need the public to support those changes, and we believe one of the best ways of ensuring that support is to allow individuals to have a share in those projects.
“Falck Renewables has a 15-year track record of working with Energy4All having successfully set up seven co-operatives at its Scottish onshore wind farms, enabling thousands of people to buy a stake in their local wind farm.
“We think partnerships of this sort could be a model for other offshore projects in both the UK and the rest of Europe.”
Reacting to the outcome of the application process for ScotWind leasing by Crown Estate Scotland, the ALBA Party Depute Leader and MP for East Lothian Kenny MacAskill MP said: “This offshore wind giveaway is selling the family silver cheap while Scots families face crippling energy bills this April.
“Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. It looks like the Scottish Government have surrendered vast chunks of the North Sea wind resource for a relative pittance just as Westminster gave away Scotland’s oil in the 1970s.
“Instead of a one off payment of under £700 million there should be annual payments. Instead of Scottish resources being just handed over to international investment companies there should be a public stake in every single field.
“One has to question the basic competence of Crown Estate Scotland. They think they have auctioned away 10-12 GW of power. Informed industry estimates are the real capacity from this round alone is double that.
“Offshore wind is fast becoming the most lucrative major power source on the planet. Scotland has one quarter of the resource of Europe. It will be cold comfort to Scottish pensioners shivering in their homes facing vast fuel bills to know that the Scottish Government have given away so much of the green power of the future for so little in return.”
The STUC says that the announcement must mark the end of broken promises to Scottish workers and presage the start of a long overdue renewables jobs revolution.
Oil giants Shell and BP, alongside Scottish and Southern Energy, Scottish Power Renewables, and a number of multinational companies have all won leases to develop offshore wind farms off Scotland’s coast.
Following campaigns from trade unions in the wake of failures to secure meaningful fabrication contracts at BiFab, the ScotWind leasing round included requirements on companies to make supply chain commitments, with many bidders making public statements promising major investments in job creation. However, these statements have not yet been published and in any case they do not require a specific proportion of work to be undertaken locally.
The STUC continues to be concerned that so few successful bids are from domestic companies, with previous experience showing that multinational companies regularly offshore work to Europe and the Far East.
The STUC is calling for the Scottish Government to call a summit of successful developers to secure ongoing commitments to cooperate on delivery and work with unions and government to make the green jobs revolution a reality.
STUC General Secretary Roz Foyer said: “Over the past six months the public relations teams of the prospective bidders have been in overdrive, promising the long overdue renewables jobs revolution. Now we need to make that happen.
“The First Minister says that we have every reason to be optimistic about the number of jobs that can be created, but our skills workers in oil and gas need more than words given the experience over the past decade tells us that jobs in offshore wind are consistently offshored overseas.
“With over 1000 massive turbines to become operational over the next decade, it would be nothing short of economic vandalism if we fail to build a thriving supply chain in Scotland. Fundamental to that is building the infrastructure to enable large scale fabrication in Scottish yards, requiring local content from developers, and addressing questions of ownership through the development of a Scottish National Infrastructure company.
“Unions will work proactively and positively with employers and business to deliver the Fair Work future our workers deserve, but we will also campaign vigorously to ensure that promises are kept.”