E.ON backs Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator

E.ON is the latest investor to join the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA).

The five founding members of OWA – DONG Energy, RWE Innogy, ScottishPower Renewables, SSE Renewables and Statoil – were recently joined by Mainstream Renewable Power and Statkraft. E.ON joining the party brings the total investment into the project to £9.2m so far.

OWA is an R&D initiative designed to reduce the total cost of offshore wind energy. Giant offshore wind structures need to be installed at a rate of around two per day for the next decade if the UK is to meet its target of deriving 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Currently, less than one turbine a week is installed, but OWA aims to reduce costs by 10 per cent over the next decade, which would enable deployment to happen more quickly.

Collectively, OWA partners represent 61 per cent of the offshore wind capacity licensed in UK waters (30GW).

“E.ON has installed 64 per cent of all offshore capacity in Europe so far this year, and we have another 4000MW of offshore wind in our project pipeline, so reducing the cost is important to us,” said Michael Lewis, European managing director of E.ON’s renewable business. “OWA will help focus the industry’s efforts to tackle the big issues in a co-ordinated way, and the results will benefit us all.”

A report to be published soon by consultancy Arthur D Little criticises the government’s fixation with wind energy. “Given that offshore installation is dependent on favourable weather conditions, [two turbines a day] seems like a physically impossible schedule, even if all the supply ships and engineering equipment were available on the scale required for such an undertaking, which they are not yet,” said Nick White, co-author of the report and energy practice leader at the consultancy. “Policy makers seem to gloss over these real-world engineering constraints.”