Wind

Korean-owned solar giant 'looks for partners' for European offshore wind push

Hanwha subsidiary Q Energy already teamed with Equinor to bid in French floating wind auction

Q Energy France managing director Jean-Francois Petit (l) and offshore wind head Chanhee Son.
Q Energy France managing director Jean-Francois Petit (l) and offshore wind head Chanhee Son.Foto: Bernd Radowitz

Q Energy is ‘looking for partners’ to bid in offshore wind tenders in Portugal and Germany, after already teaming up with Norwegian oil giant Equinor and financier Green Giraffe for upcoming floating wind tenders in France.

The developer owned by South Korean conglomerate Hanwha told Recharge it is preparing for Portugal’s first 3.5GW floating wind auction slated to take place later this year or early next, which is part of a drive by the Iberian country to auction off 10GW of offshore wind capacity this decade.

The Portuguese government hasn’t set a firm date for the first auction yet but said it would soon have a pre-qualification round and ask interested parties to officially respond to expressions of interest for first three sites off Viana de Castelo in northern Portugal, Figuera da Foz (near Coimbra) and Leixões (near Porto).

“We are doing studies on these sites. … Each site has its characteristics although by and large, they are to the Atlantic, so the conditions would be similar,” Chanhee Son, head of offshore wind at Q Energy told Recharge in an interview during the Husum Wind exposition last week.

Due to its deep waters in the Atlantic Ocean, all sites in the first auctions and most zones proposed for offshore wind by the Portuguese economics and maritime ministry at the beginning of the year are for floating wind.

The site at Viana de Castelo is close to the location where an Ocean Winds-led consortium is already operating Portugal’s first 25MW floating wind pilot, the three-turbine WindFloat Atlantic array.

In Germany, though, Q Energy is preparing for a bid for bottom-fixed offshore wind sites.

“We are studying intensely what has been done in the past and what was going on this year. [We are looking at] the central and non-central tenders in order to understand the German auction system, and in parallel be looking for a partner,” Son said.

Germany this year auctioned off 1.8GW in offshore wind acreage under the so-called centralised system for pre-developed sites, and another 7GW in a tender for far-offshore areas that haven’t been developed yet. Both included a second round of a so-called ‘dynamic bidding process’, where companies pay for the right to further develop and operate the sites. In the case of the 7GW round, oil giants Totalenergies and BP were willing to pay a record-setting €12.6bn ($13.4bn) – making Germany the most hotly contested market for wind at sea.

Q Energy earlier had already teamed up with Norwegian oil giant Equinor and renewables financier Green Giraffe to bid in upcoming French offshore wind tenders, which like in Portugal are also mostly floating.

“In Océole [with Equinor], we are partnering on the A05, A06, and A07 floating auctions for Brittany, the Mediterranean, and bottom-fixed for the Atlantic, which could be partially floating,” Q Energy France managing director Jean-Francois Petit told Recharge.

The consortium has already prepared everything to hand in its bid for the 250MW AO5 floating wind zone off Brittany before an October 2 deadline, Petit added.

It is yet unknown when another two 250MW sites in the French Mediterranean (AO6) will be auctioned off, but the tender is likely to be held in early or mid-2024, he said.

France plans to further auction off another 1.5GW in the Atlantic, which could be both fixed-bottom and floating.

The developer in total has a 6GW development pipeline in France and of more than 15GW across Europe.

Q Energy’s parent through its Hanwha Engineering and Construction unit is also developing a 400MW offshore wind project off Sinan in southwestern Korea.

The conglomerate’s shipbuilding unit Hanwha Ocean could leverage new competencies to Q Energy as well, Son said. This could help Q Energy’s offshore wind development plans amid expected possible bottlenecks with offshore wind installation vessels later this decade as countries across the globe are steeply increasing their offshore wind ambitions.

Q Energy was launched in 2022 and operates as a sister company to Hanwha’s long-standing Q Cells PV module business.

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Published 21 September 2023, 07:57Updated 21 September 2023, 08:05
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