Energy company aims to become first plc to focus on offshore

Renamed SeaEnergy Plc, the company wants to be at the forefront of what it considers to be the UK’s enormous potential for offshore wind opportunities.

Stephen Remp, executive chairman of Ramco Energy said: “The offshore wind opportunity is truly enormous, with over £130 billion of investment envisaged over the next 11 years through the Scottish and UK Offshore Rounds. The North Sea is once again opening up for development, this time driven by the global demand for clean energy, and SeaEnergy will be at the heart of this revolution."

Ramco has prior experience of offshore wind through its marine renewable subsidiary company, SeaEnergy Renewables Limited (SERL), which was launched in June 2008.

SERL conceived, developed and delivered the world’s first deep water wind farm development, a 10 megawatt (MW) offshore wind farm dubbed the 'Beatrice Project'. It involved the installation of two of the largest wind turbines (5 MW each) ever deployed offshore, at water depths of 45 metres.

Ramco believes the skills and expertise developed in the Beatrice Project, along with its team’s expertise in delivering deep water offshore developments in the oil and gas industry, will ensure that the new SeaEnergy company is in a strong position in the emerging offshore renewables industry.

"SeaEnergy’s unique experience in the successful development of deep water offshore wind turbines – an industry first – is reflected in the quality of our partnerships already formed with major European utilities,” said Remp.

Although Ramco is unsure how long it will take to exit all their other business interests, so far SeaEnergy has managed to secure a 25 per ent interest in two joint ventures to develop offshore wind farms with a total capacity of over 1800MW with partners Scottish & Southern Energy (Airtricity) and RWE AG (npower).

Together with EDP Renewables (EDPR) it has also made applications for sites to be awarded through the UK Offshore Round Three process.