Round Three offshore developers announced but huge challenges remain

The development partners, primarily consortiums, include major players in the wind power industry, and in total the licences won could eventually deliver 25 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power.

The Forewind Consortium, including RWE, Scottish & Southern and Norway’s Statkraft AS and Statoil won rights to develop the largest block, the 9 GW Dogger Bank, about 200 miles northeast of London in the North Sea. East Anglia Offshore Wind Ltd, equally owned by Scottish Power Renewables and Vattenfall Vindkraft, will develop the Norfolk zone, which may deliver as much as 7,2 GW.  The Irish Sea Zone, the third largest area with a potential capacity of 4.2 GW, has been awarded to Centrica and RES Group.

All partners have signed exclusive Zone Development Agreements with the Crown Estate, who has responsibility for renewable energy development in UK waters, and must now go through planning and consenting.

When the winners were announced this morning, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “Our policies in support of offshore wind energy have already put us ahead of every other country in the world. This new round of licences provides a substantial new platform for investing in UK industrial capacity.

"The offshore wind industry is at the heart of the UK economy’s shift to low carbon and could be worth £75 billion and support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020.

"This announcement will make a significant and practical contribution to reducing our CO2 emissions and the Government will work with developers and The Crown Estate to support the growing offshore wind industry and help remove barriers to rapid development.”

However, The Carbon Trust, the Government backed company set up to encourage the UK's move to a low carbon economy, has warned that the UK should not underestimate the huge scale and the engineering challenges involved in meeting EU 15 per cent renewable targets. To do so, the UK will need to deploy 6,000 offshore wind turbines by 2020 – around 2.5 per day, with deployment needing to happen "faster, cheaper and more safely than before", says the Carbon Trust.

"Round Three offers the UK a fantastic opportunity to build a new low carbon industry that should attract significant inward investment to create some 70,000 new jobs over the next 10 years. But the road ahead will not be easy," said Tom Delay, chief executive, the Carbon Trust. "The hard work now begins. The engineering challenge is huge and will require us to deploy offshore turbines at unprecedented rates in hostile waters to ensure we meet our renewable energy and carbon reduction targets."

Delay points to the added challenge of building Round Three in the most cost effective way possible. "This means we must focus our R&D efforts on key areas where costs can be stripped out of the projected £75 billion construction bill.

"We estimate that it is possible, through good siting and technological advances, to reduce the cost of deployment for Round 3 by as much as 40 per cent over the coming decade."

The Crown Estate, whose marine properties include more than half of the UK’s foreshore (17,000 kilometres), 55 per cent of the beds of tidal rivers and estuaries and almost the entire seabed out to the 12 nautical mile territorial limit around the UK, has said that a series of supply chain events will be held across the UK in January, February and March to support the delivery of the offshore wind industry.

General manager of Forewind, Frank-Are Steinbakk, winner of the Dogger Bank Zone, said: "This is an incredibly exciting project and heralds a completely new era for offshore wind, however there are many technical and logistical challenges to be addressed so Forewind will need to both draw fully on the experience of each of the partners and also look for innovative suppliers and contractors to help us ensure we address all the issues and achieve consent."