Offshore wind manager sees North Sea wind power island ready by 2030

The plan to build an artificial island in the North Sea that will serve as a hub for offshore wind turbines with a capacity of more than 100 gigawatts is making good progress, Pieter van Oord, CEO of offshore wind farm builder Van Oord, told the newspaper Tagesspiegel. “This is going to work, it will be built no later than 2030,” van Oord said about the ambitious project at the shallow Dogger Bank, which has been considered by German-Dutch company TenneT and other grid operators but was deemed almost impossible to realise by many industry observers. “Raising the island will maybe cost half a billion and total costs will be one billion, more or less,” the manager, whose company also helped build the famous Palm Jumeirah artificial island off Dubai, told the newspaper. Van Oord, who calls the North Sea “the Saudi-Arabia of wind power,” added that “a single nuclear plant costs several times as much” as the planned offshore wind hub.

Offshore wind is an important pillar of Germany’s energy transition, with a total of just over 1,300 turbines already spinning in the country’s territorial waters in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea in 2018. Lobby groups say the government should allow for faster capacity growth, and that the country’s 2030 target for offshore wind capacity should rise from 15 to 20 GW.