On Monday, April 30th the Taiwanese Ministry of Economy announced the award of 1 GW of grid connection capacity for the implementation of the offshore wind projects Yunlin and Guanyin to wpd. With the award of these projects developed by wpd during the last years, the company is meeting an important milestone of its strategy to expand its leading role for the energy transition of Taiwan. After more than 10 years presence and together with partners, wpd reached a market share of about 50 percent in the onshore business. wpd will also stand in the frontline of the first offshore projects to be implemented.
The Yunlin project, which will be built eight kilometer off the coast of Yunlin County, will be the first project and will be commissioned in 2020/2021 with about 650-700 MW. “Everybody who followed us during the last year knows that our main focus for Yunlin is the speedy construction completed in 2020. While the acknowledgment of this approach by the Government is really great news, we will now concentrate on tying together contractors, banks and investors for this important goal”, comments Achim Berge Olsen, Managing Director of wpd offshore GmbH.
The Guanyin project, which will be built two kilometer off the coast of Taoyuan County, will be the second project and will be commissioned in 2021 with about 350 MW. Yuni Wang, Managing Director of wpd Taiwan explains: “Main focus of our bid for Guanyin is the localization of the supply chain. Together with Taiwanese partners a localization plan has been presented which will bring a lot of knowledge transfer to Taiwan while maintaining quality and time constraints for the project. We would like to express our gratitude to all involved parties.”
“We are impressed by the dedication of the Taiwanese Government to their offshore wind strategy. They There have not been any changes or delays during the selection process. We as wpd will stick to that attitude and simply deliver our projects now”, Achim Berge Olsen summarizes the experience with the offshore wind tender in Taiwan and gives a further outlook: “Joint teams have been created out of the 200 technical experts from Germany with three offshore projects constructed and the 75 Taiwanese colleagues with their development excellence. This combination of skills will be key for realizing Yunlin and Guanyin.”
About the selection process
In 2015, the Taiwanese government designated areas for the construction of offshore parks for the first time in order to achieve the target of 5.5 GW from renewable energies by 2025. Of these, 500 MW are to be implemented between 2020 and 3 GW by 2021 to 2025. The rest will be allocated during a price tender later this year. In 2017, the government initiated a selection procedure for potential projects. By 30th March 2018, projects with a volume of more than 10 GW have applied of which 3.5 GW have been awarded grid connection capacity now.
About wpd AG and wpd Taiwan Energy Co. Ltd.
wpd is a developer and operator of onshore and offshore wind farms worldwide, and is actively engaged in 18 countries. The head office is in Bremen, Germany. For more than 20 years the company has been realizing projects which now total 2,180 wind turbines with a total capacity of 4,400 MW. With wpd offshore GmbH, the company has reached full permitting package for 13 offshore wind farms of which five (1,300 MW) are operational. In December 2017 the German nearshore project Nordergründe was connected to the grid with a capacity of 111 megawatts. The Taiwanese market plays a leading role in wpd´s growth strategy and the company focusses and will continue to work on Taiwan´s future energy turnaround. 75 employees are currently realizing the pipeline of 500 MW onshore wind farms, 1,000 MW offshore wind farms and 50 MW photovoltaic plants. So far, wpd together with partners realized more than 380 MW onshore in Taiwan.