Winners to be revealed in £100bn bid battle to build UK windparks

Robin Pagnamenta: Energy Editor

A £100 billion project to erect up to 5,000 giant wind turbines around the coastline of Britain will take a big step forward next month when winning bidders to build nine offshore windparks will be announced.
The Crown Estate, which owns the UK seabed and is administering the auction, is preparing to announce the consortiums for the sites on January 6, The Times has learnt.
A string of companies is involved in the bidding for the Round Three projects, including a consortium involving ScottishPower and Vattenfall, the Swedish state-owned energy company that is thought to be well placed to win one of the most attractive sites — a 5,000-megawatt wind-farm site off the coast of Norfolk. It will be three times the size of the 341-turbine London Array project, which is being built in the Thames Estuary.
Another utility consortium called Forewind — including RWE npower renewables and Scottish and Southern Energy — is thought to be the front-runner to construct the even bigger 10,000-megawatt Dogger Bank plot in the North Sea.

Together, if completed, the nine sites would have the potential to generate 25,000 megawatts of electricity — the equivalent of 21 Sizewell B nuclear power stations, or enough to meet the needs of more than 30 million homes when the wind is blowing.
Nick Medic, a spokesman for the British Wind Energy Association, said there would be a long planning review and the first Round Three turbines would not be erected before 2015.
However, big uncertainties persist over the financing of the projects. Peter Atherton, utilities analyst at Citigroup, estimates that the cost of installing one megawatt of offshore wind is about £3.5 million — roughly five times the cost of building a gas-fired power station with the same capacity.
On that basis, 25 gigawatts of offshore wind would lead to a bill of about £87.5 billion, with further investment required to strengthen the national grid.
Mr Medic said most of the turbines used for the offshore wind farms would be at least twice as big as the 2.5-megawatt turbines commonly used now. Only a small number of offshore wind projects are currently generating electricity in Britain.