The energy company EnBW wants to start building the largest German offshore wind farm to date in the North Sea in the coming days. Electricity for 1.1 million households is expected to be produced there by the end of 2025.
The Karlsruhe-based energy group EnBW is building a new wind farm on the high seas in the North Sea, which will supply electricity for an estimated 1.1 million households in the future. Peter Heydecker, Board Member for Sustainable Generation Infrastructure, announced today that the first foundations will be laid next Saturday.
The planned wind farm “He Dreiht” (Low German for “He turns”) is scheduled to go online at the end of 2025 about 90 kilometers north of the island of Borkum. With 64 wind turbines, whose rotors will have a diameter of more than 230 meters, according to EnBW, an installed capacity of 960 megawatts (0.9 gigawatts) will be generated. With an investment sum of around 2.4 billion euros, “He Dreiht” is currently one of the largest energy transition projects in Europe and is one of the first offshore wind farms without state funding.
Largest offshore performance in the EU
In a European comparison, EnBW’s new wind farm is still one of the medium-sized parks in terms of installed capacity. The largest wind farm currently producing electricity off Europe’s coast is the “Hollandse Kust Zuid”. It is located off the Dutch coast between the cities of Scheveningen and Zandvoort and, thanks to an installed capacity of 1.5 gigawatts, is one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world.
Offshore wind farms such as the one that EnBW is now to build off the coast of Borkum or the “Hollandse Kust Zuid” off Zandvoort generate significantly more electricity per year compared to onshore systems of the same size: “At sea the wind blows more continuously, Offshore wind farms can therefore use their full power more often. These so-called full load hours are about twice as high as those of onshore wind turbines,” explains Philipp Artur Kienscherf, Head of Research Area at the Energy Economics Institute at the University of Cologne (EWI). tagesschau.de.
This is mainly due to the more optimal wind conditions at sea. The electricity generated by the offshore wind farms is then fed onto land and into the power grid via a submarine cable. A total of 29 of these offshore systems are already located off Germany’s coast – with more than 1,500 wind turbines and an installed capacity of almost 8.5 gigawatts. That was loud in 2023 current information from WindEurope the highest offshore performance in the EU. “Outside the EU, the United Kingdom with its long coastlines has a lot of offshore wind power. More than 11 gigawatts are installed here,” says expert Kienscherf from the EWI.
Are the expansion goals achievable?
According to the federal government, several new offshore facilities went into operation last year. In addition, four additional wind farms with around 2.5 gigawatts of output are currently under construction off the German coast. These include the two wind farms “Godewind 3” and “Borkum Riffgrund 32”, which were already approved at the end of 2021 and are due to go online this year and next year respectively.
The federal government has set ambitious goals for further expansion. In the Wind Energy at Sea Act, which was passed last year, the expansion targets for wind energy at sea have been significantly increased: by 2030, the output of offshore wind farms should increase to at least 30 gigawatts, by 2035 at least 40 gigawatts and by 2045 at least 70 gigawatts of installed capacity can be achieved.
With regard to the federal government’s expansion target, EnBW CEO Georg Stamatelopoulos made it clear that a wind farm of the size of “He Dreiht” would actually have to be built every three months. This goal is not out of the question, but to achieve it we still need a lot of acceleration and support, says Stamatelopoulos.
High costs for construction and maintenance
With a view to the federal government’s goals for expanding offshore wind power, expert Kienscherf also emphasizes that several more large wind farms will have to be built in the coming years. “Last year, according to the Federal Statistical Office, offshore wind farms contributed to around five percent of German electricity generation,” said Kienscherf. This corresponds to a share of ten percent of the peak load.
However, the construction of offshore wind farms is associated with major financial burdens: The fact that there are currently significantly more wind farms on land than at sea is mainly due to the high construction costs that wind farms at sea entail – because the construction of the offshore systems is technically and logistically complex. Maintenance and repair work on offshore wind farms is also more complicated and expensive because it can only be carried out under suitable weather conditions.