Huge potential in offshore wind power
OX2 is currently holding a material offshore wind development portfolio and solds its first offshore wind projects in 2022. OX2 takes advantage of an increasing willingness to invest that is now focusing on offshore wind power
Facts about offshore wind power
Offshore wind power will play a key role in increasing the future electricity supply in Europe. The continent currently leads the world in offshore wind power. In the European Commission's proposed strategy, offshore wind power is expected to increase fivefold to 60 GW by 2030.
The first offshore wind farm was opened in Denmark in 1992. The potential is enormous and in the last years offshore has experienced a revival.
Offshore turbines can be considerably larger than onshore turbines. In OX2’s project Aurora, the total height is planned to be 370 meters. That is higher than the Eiffel tower in Paris. The total capacity of the Aurora wind farm would be 5.5 GW. The largest onshore wind farm in Europe has a total capacity of 600 MW, or 0.6 GW.
Offshore the winds reach higher speeds and the wind direction is more consistent. That way the wind farm needs fewer turbines to provide the same amount of power as onshore farms.
Offshore wind farms can be installed far away from where people live. They can also have a positive impact on the environment by keeping the marine ecosystem safe.
There are two kinds of offshore wind turbines, the bottom-fixed and the floating foundations. Floating turbines is still a new technology.
OX2 and offshore wind power
OX2 takes advantage of an increasing willingness to invest that is now focusing on offshore wind power. Offshore wind makes up about half of our project development portfolio, located in Sweden and Finland.
The strategy for offshore wind differs from onshore wind. In offshore we have a partnership model, which can include selling parts of the ownership stake in the projects during the permitting phase to enable continued diversification and expansion of the project development portfolio. For onshore wind the sale typically takes place when the development phase is completed.
The first offshore wind development project was partly, a 49 percent share, divested in 2022. The project has a potential of total installed capacity of 9 GW. It consists of three wind farms: Galatea-Galene, located off the coast of Halland, Triton, located off the coast of Skåne and Aurora, located off the coast of Gotland and Öland. The projects have the potential to produce up to 38 TWh combined, once operational, corresponding to more than 25 percent of the electricity consumed in Sweden 2021.
- Offshore wind power will play a key role in increasing our project development portfolio and thereby represent a large share of OX2’s future energy mix
- Project development portfolio of about 13.9 GW at year-end 2022
- The largest project in the portfolio is the Aurora wind farm outside of the islands of Gotland and Öland in Sweden with a total capacity of 5.5 GW