Orsted Pull Out Of Norway Wind Auctions
By Paul Homewood
h/t John Brown
Meanwhile Orsted are also pulling out of Norway:
The withdrawal comes just two days before Norway’s November 15 deadline to submit pre-qualification interests for the building of up to 1.5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity.
"Orsted has informed us that due to a prioritisation of investments in the portfolio, it will withdraw from pursuing participation in offshore wind developments in Norway, and therefore their participation in the partnership will discontinue," Norway’s Bonheur ASA (BONHR.OL) said in a statement to Reuters.
Separately, Orsted told Reuters by email that it was no longer prioritizing offshore wind development in Norway.
Earlier in November, Orsted walked away from U.S. offshore wind projects, citing soaring costs, supply chain issues and high interest rates.
Prior to withdrawing from the U.S. projects, Orsted CEO Mads Nipper told Bloomberg that the Biden administration needed to guarantee more support for the projects at a time when soaring inflation was undermining the renewable energy sector. Orsted would have received at least 30% tax credits under the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA); however, the company had asked the Biden administration to guarantee subsidies without the domestic content requirement as well as requesting more time to source U.S.-made materials due to supply chain bottlenecks.
In late August, Orsted warned that it could face up to $2.3 billion in impairments on the U.S. projects.
Orsted’s stock plummeted 20% on November 1 when it officially withdrew from the U.S. projects.
Renewable energy stocks have significantly underperformed their fossil fuel peers and the broader market in the current year, with the selloff accelerating recently due to high interest rates and despite the IRA.
Quite clearly the offshore wind industry is in almighty mess. It has grown out of all proportion in recent years on the back of obscene taxpayer subsidies around the world.
Now that these subsidies are drying up, they are finding that offshore wind farms simply aren’t viable.
Orsted is in a particular fix, because the impairments in the US, and consequential catastrophic loss of market value, mean that it is desperately short of capital.
As I commented earlier, if Denmark wants an offshore wind industry, it should bail Orsted out itself, and not expect the rest of the world to,
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
If Norway won’t pay the premium now asked for, nobody can afford it.
They have made massive profits over recent years due to the foolish UK contracts which allowed wind to supply whenever the wind blew without any back-up for when it did not. Other countries are not so “green” as the UK!
I wish they’d pull out of the UK, electricity would be far cheaper if generated by gas, coal or nuclear
Given the performance of their generation, shouldn’t wind and solar stocks be about 20% of the value of coal, oil and gas? Or perhaps their trading time should be limited to that amount.
Ørsted has just sacked its COO and CFO.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/orsted-fires-cfo-coo-2023-11-14/
The model of gambling on being able to sell large stakes of wind farms to pension funds for silly prices is over.
Careful this isnt a ploy to lull govts especially ours into panicking and boosting up subsidies.
The problem with Net Zero … is it puts up the cost of every thing including Net Zero. Orsted are undoubtedly seeing their profits shrink because of the rising costs from Net Zero.
It’s a vicious cycle. The more Net Zero, the most the costs of not just the next stage of Net Zero, but maintaining all the stupidity so far committed to the Net Zero asylum also increases. So, to keep going what has already gone, even bigger subsidies are needed for all the previous insanity, before even bigger subsidies for the next load of insanity.