Who Owns Our Offshore Wind Farms?
By Paul Homewood
https://ref.org.uk/generators/search.php
I wrote yesterday about the ownership of the London Array offshore wind farm, To recap, London Array is jointly owned by the German owned RWE, the Canadian investor CDPQ, Orsted the Danish state owned energy company and he strategic investment company of the Government of Abu Dhabi, MASDAR. At current wholesale prices, London Array is making about £800 million a year more than they would have at 2019 prices.
None of the consortium are retail electricity suppliers in the UK, so would be shielded from any windfall tax on or nationalisation of energy suppliers, as has been suggested.
I thought I would like at some of the other big wind farms, which are subsidised by ROCs. The chart above is provided by the Renewable Energy Foundation, and I have listed below the owners of the eight other wind farms with capacity of 300 MW and over.
Race Bank – Macquarie, Orsted, Sumitomo Bank
Greater Gabbard – RWE Renewables, SSE Renewables
Gwynt y Mor – RWE Renewables, Stadtwerke Munchen, UK Green Investment Bank
Rampion – RWE Renewables, Enbridge, Offshore Wind Company
Galloper – RWE Renewables, Siemens, Macquarie, ESB, Spring Infrastructure
West Duddon – Scottish Power, Orsted
Thanet – Vattenfall
Sheringham – Equinor, Statkraft, UK Green Investment Bank
In short, they are nearly all wholly owned by a mix of foreign energy companies, banks and other infrastructure investors. As with the London Array, all of these wind farms/owners would be unaffected by taxes on energy retailers, with the exception of SSE and Scottish Power.
The combined output of these eight and London Array is about 16 TWh a year. At current prices of £375/MWh, the excess profit now being “earned” is around £5 billion a year.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
npower is RWE.
\clearly, it is not just Germany that has made itself energy dependent on foreign sources.
I trust the BBC/MSM will be reporting on this matter?
Isn’t SSE Spanish owned?
Scottish Power is owned by Iberdrola of Spain
SSE is on the stock market, but is now reversed into a Swiss holding Company because the Board were scared the Labour would re-nationalise it.
“The combined output of these eight and London Array is about 16 TWh a year. At current prices of £375/MWh, the excess profit now being “earned” is around £5 billion a year.”
The Labia Party and the LimpDims (not even to mention the Beeb) will be absolutely clamouring for that to be subjected to a windfall tax.
I suggest starting at 150%.
But aren’t they unaffected by taxes on energy retailers, except SSE and Scottish Power?
Well, I look at it this way. If determined, any Government with a majority of 80 can do pretty much what it likes. HMG (to the applause of the opposition parties, introduced ‘price caps’ and yet another round of “windfall taxes”. As usual, Labia opposition moaned only “Sooner, Harder, Longer.”
OK, the Oil & Gas industries have been let down by the virtue signalling arses like Lord Browne, Baron Browne of Madingley. But the wiser guys know that their products will be absolutely essential for at least another thirty years. So they grumble, they desist from investment as their bankers insist, but they need not fear the dole queue, especially when their talents are needed all around the World.
So, if HMG wanted to tax ruinable energy, they could find a way to do it before going to bed tonight. And why wouldn’t they, when the malicious creeps who run the wickedly subsidised industry have been getting away with murder, for years?
State ownership solves this problem, pay the cost of construction up front, then pay the existing operators to continue, on a cost plus reasonable profit basis. The wholesale price of electricity is removed from the equation.
Mere ownership of the asset is unlikely to reveal where the real profits are being made. These companies will all have offtake PPAs that offer some sort of bankable revenue to the investor, but be sure that the banks who provide the funding probably have an ocean of offshore vehicles hoovering up the profits between the PPA price and the market.
Aah, but think of all the lovely ‘Green Jobs’ that those ££Trillions are providing!!
These jobs would appear to be anywhere apart from the UK
Sadly, I am not even a little surprised by this
Big multinational business owns the wind farms, right up to the point where they no longer make a profit. Then suddenly the taxpayer will own the requirement to demolish them and clean up the site…
When their time has come, they should be left as monuments to the supreme stupidity of politicians and enviroMentalists, and of corrupt ‘scientists’ and the media.
Dodgy,
Regarding “Then suddenly …”
Frequently, when the return on capital starts to diminish and maintenance costs begin to increase the original investors sell. This allows for reallocation of capital to a better use. The new owners continue to get income, diminishing over time. Maintenance suffers and decline sets in. At some point administration occurs (bankruptcy in the USA). Removing structures at a place that doesn’t have an alternative income-producing use are sometimes just left to rot.
Example: In Central Washington State there is a Darrieus wind turbine (vertical axis) that was erected in the late 1970s or early ’80s. It was a failure, but still stands.
Use Google Earth Pro to see with “street view” at the location:
Lat/Long: 47.10107, -120.751263
It is about 115 meters east of the road.
How the usefulness of windmills is being punctured at the moment! Where stands energienwende? Just watched a very recent Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox dealing soberly with the European energy crisis. Absolutely terrifying.
Paul, could you (or any other reader) put the combined capacity and output figures of these wind farms into context versus a CCGT or nuke station please?
Also the price per MW/h.
It would make for an interesting comparison.
For a quick look try this website.
http://www.mygridgb.co.uk/last-28-days/
Worth noting that 8 knackered old reactors (AGRs) with one aging decent one (Sizewell B PWR) with a total maximum capacity of under 6GW have provided the UK with almost 16% of our electricity this month while 25.5GW of bright shiny new wind turbines have managed only just over 12%.
Cheers, I’ll take a look.
I hope that the public would be shocked if they understood the extent to which the UK’s energy industry has been sold off to foreigners. Also the extent to which foreigners are hoovering up the renewables subsidies. I wrote about it here:
further to all this . BBC news wetting itself about how wonderful it is that the Hornsea array is now fully operational. Power will get cheaper it says. Also we should make it easier to have land windmills.
I wonder if you might investigate any links between investors in offshore wind farms and aviation. I have a hypothesis that the creation of offshore wind farms was inspired by the need to extend cloud forming infrastructure rather than the need for more energy generation.
The cloud formation system run by the MET Office required RF antenna to operate. Until offshore wind, these clouds could only form over land. I highlighted this in 2015. Wind farms now extend that reach over the sea to make it less obvious.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
http://www.look-up.org.uk/induced-cumulus-space-station/#more-6913