Vårgrønn’s Massive UK Offshore Floating Wind Project

In the Uptime Spotlight today is Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, the
company building the world's largest offshore wind farm with a
government contract: Green Volt. Stephen discusses the massive
project's progress, planning, and logistics to be completed by
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co
host, Joel Saxum today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Bull, CEO of
Vårgrønn, who is leading the charge in developing some of Europe's
most ambitious floating offshore wind projects. Stephen brings over
25 years of energy industry experience and currently oversees
Vårgrønn's Impressive portfolio of projects across Northern Europe,
including Greenvolt, set to become the world's largest floating
offshore wind farm with a government contract. Welcome to Uptime
Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators.
This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Steven, welcome
to the show. Thanks so much, great to be here. Well, the Greenvolt
project is one of the most important Impressive projects going on
in the world right now, and you're heavily involved with that, of
course, as being the CEO of Vårgrønn and I want to understand a
little bit about how that project came together and what problem
Greenvolt is trying to solve. Stephen Bull: Yeah, sure. I mean,
it's kind of neat to say it's the most exciting project. I think
it's, uh, it's quite a scary project in many respects for us as
well when you work within the offshore wind sector at the moment,
but definitely within floating offshore wind. Yeah. If we sort of
dial it back down to the project itself, I mean, what we're solving
for here is, is the generic problem with offshore wind in deeper
waters. And, uh, and really when you start to push the boundaries
beyond 60, you know, 60 odd plus, 70 meter water depths, you need
to start to go into the floating territory. Um, and that's
something that you find distinctly within the coast of Scotland as
well. There's only so much of that seabed that is shallow and then
it starts to push out there. So, Scottish authorities, the Scottish
Crown Estate, the guys who basically own the seabed license around
there, want to have further developments within offshore wind, but
um, they are inhibited in the sense that they have deeper waters.
Um, at the same time, there's still a quite large oil and gas
industry in, of Scottish waters as there is in Norway, as well as
the two largest producers in Europe. They also have carbon issues,
carbon problems of CO2 emissions from their own Scope 1 emissions.
So the Scottish authorities have put together a concept which is
called targeted oil and gas. And essentially they've been looking
to lease out areas where we could develop offshore wind, both that
go straight into the grid. For the benefit of consumers, but also
could help decarbonize oil and gas operations as well. So that's
the background around it. It's happened pretty quickly. To be
honest, we, we received our, uh, you know, essentially our lease
just over a year ago, year and a half ago. Uh, we won a contract
for difference from the UK government in September. Uh, for 400
megawatts and we're just basically right in the middle of
procurement and developing the whole concept now so we could be
online by 2030. Allen Hall: Wow, that's a really short timeline.
There's a lot to be done between now and then. In terms of the
electricity for a minute, let me just walk through this. Your plan,
and the way it's proposed, is there's floating platforms with wind,
there's a HVDC line, I think is where you're going, that will run
to offshore oil and gas platforms, so it will power those oil and
gas platforms, but it also runs onshore into Scotland. So, you can
power oil and gas offshore, also power onshore, and then that's
sort of a bi directional feed that, in the event that the wind's
not blowing enough in Scotland, which is really important. Pretty
rare, honestly, then the power can come onshore to the oil and gas
platform. So it's sort of a redundant tool to offtake system.
Stephen Bull: Yeah, it is. So the, the, the, what underpins the
project itself is, is the contract with difference. And this is the
policy mechanism. The UK government has basically dialed down for,
for some time. Um, it's, it's a 15 year price you receive. So
actually you go into an auction, you win a 15 years and basically
it's a, We received 139 per megawatt hour in 2012 prices. So that's
just shy of 200 per megawatt hour. Uh, and it's, so it's an
inflation adjusted, uh, within that, that period. Um, and that's
great because what you can do with that one, you can use that to
essentially underpin the financing of the project itself. Um, and
what we do on top of that one is that, you know, in outside of the
400 megawatts, then we have up to 560 megawatts that we could
produce in the total area, uh, which can, you know, help towards
oil and gas decarbonization. And it was the, you know, again, that,
that has to be, that's a direct relationship we will have with oil
and gas operators with their, with the PPA. But the idea being is
that, If they obviously want to turn off their gas turbines, or if
they're using diesel, then they need 100 percent guaranteed power.
Yeah. Joel Saxum: So a question for you there then, um, you're
gonna be pseudo co located, right? You're gonna be within, you
know, within distance of these offshore oil and gas platforms, so
you're not running an export cable hundreds and hundreds of
kilometers. But what is, so how, how many of those platforms will
you guys be able to feed? And what's the actual power demand of
those platforms? Stephen Bull: It varies quite dramatically. So the
area that we have, and we were in an area which is about 80
kilometers off the coast of a place called Peterhead, which is just
north of Aberdeen in Scotland. Um, there are some oil and gas
installations in the area. Most of them are a bit further out. So
what we did is we were awarded two licenses from Scottish
authorities. One called Greenvault. Sinos is much further out.
That's, uh, that is within the HVDC territory, but it's much closer
to oil and gas operations. And that's actually quite close to the
Norwegian border as well when it comes to, uh, the Norwegian border
between the UK continental shelf and the Norwegian continental
shelf. So that could be potentially an opportunity to decarbonize
also outside towards Norwegian platforms as well. Um, it's, it's
kind of, it's, it's when you put things in perspective, I mean, the
most important thing is that this project has got a contract for
difference. We're going to get it going. We hope we can find strong
support from oil and gas who want to sign up for a PPA so that we
actually can. Uh, work with them, decarbonize their, their
emissions, and they're not inconsiderable. They're, you know, it's
between up to maybe 13 to 15 million tons of CO2 emissions come
from the UK sector. Uh, roughly about the same in terms of Norway,
uh, as well. So, you know, 25 odd million tons of, of CO2
reductions is something which is quite considerable, which, which
oil and gas needs to do in a, in a net zero context. So. There's
different drivers of this. Some could be complete cable from shore.
Others could be that you just have don't full, fully decarbonize,
but you can reduce the amount that you use by having a gas. Uh,
turbine would also, uh, a ring fence system that you could have
with offshore wind. They do that in a project in Norway already.
It's called Highwind Tampen. So it's a, you know, an experimental
project there, but it's the largest floating offshore wind, uh,
farm today, uh, in operation. So there's, there's different ways
you can cut and slide this up, uh, in, in terms of that. But the,
the key one around it is that In many respects, you're using oil
and gas technology, for example, floating technology, deep water
technology for spas or for semi submersibles, but you're dialing it
down into something which could be, you know, in a renewable
context, and obviously repeatable as well. Joel Saxum: So it's
saying that, Highwind Tampin, I think that was an Econor project,
correct? That powered some offshore oil and gas platforms. But this
being said now, 400 megawatt contract contract for difference
permit, plus another 160 out there. So 560 total, that will put you
guys in place to be the largest offshore floating wind farm in the
world. Stephen Bull: Correct? We'll see, you know, China's pushing
things on Korea, boosting things as well. You know, so we'll see.
And then France has also threatened some 750 megawatt projects as
well. I mean, the thing is that we want to see them all happening.
And again, the hard bit about it, when you think of the 70 odd
gigawatts of offshore wind probably commissioned today, 300
megawatts is in floating. You know, it has anywhere near the scale
and the repetition and the modularization that we need to get so we
can bring the cost down. We're all for as many projects as
possible, but um, but us probably, we could probably safely say
it's the largest commercial project in Europe. A lot of people
aren't quite sure exactly what water depths that mean. What water
depths are you guys in? Joel Saxum: So we're in about 110 meter
water depths, which you know again,