Editorial June

In Germany the offshore wind development has slowly but steadily proceeded since 2010 and it is very clear that by 2020 the volume of installed offshore wind power will be around 7.7 Gigawatt. Being quite a late entrant in the offshore market, this has been a remarkable success so far over the last decade putting Germany globally in a second place on offshore wind behind the UK.

However, at the moment, the prospect for offshore wind in Germany is limited to the earlier capping of offshore wind to 15 GW by the year 2030. This cap resulted from a decision that proceeding with the anticipated larger offshore target by 2030 would result in a significant price increase for electricity in Germany – and therefore the target was slashed to 15 GW. Since 2017 however, we have seen that prices for offshore wind tenders have come down quickly internationally and in a number of cases in Germany and the Netherlands we have even seen “zero bids”, where wind arm developers want to sell the electricity on the power market without a feed-in rate.

10 days ago, for the first time, the Parliamentary State Secretary Thomas Bareiss from the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, announced, that the ministry is considering to raise the current goal from 15 GW to 20 GW by 2030. So, after quite a long time when the Federal government was hesitant about lifting the cap, now finally the new cost situation for offshore wind seems to be appreciated in Berlin. We very much welcome this new openness by the federal government for more offshore wind. So, we are looking forward to a formal government decision on lifting the cap to 20 GW in 2030. Our sector has realized remarkable cost degression in the last years – our members are open to support the decisions by the federal government by market initiatives in a competitive environment!