Nine developers looking to build offshore wind farms in Taiwan have qualified for offshore environmental permits. These developers, offering 10.5GW of offshore wind capacity in total, will now compete for 5.5GW of offshore wind contracts, 3.5GW to be selected for the feed-in-tariff (FIT) and the rest to be awarded at an auction in May.
This is according to K2 Management, whose Business Development Director for Taiwan, Scott Hsu, said that this means that all the developers selected through both schemes will sign their contracts by the end of June 2018.
“This is an exciting development for the offshore market in Taiwan – the original offshore wind target was 3.5 GW before the auction scheme was introduced so to see a 5.5 GW commitment from the government, the industry and stakeholders with a commercial operation date (COD) of 2025, is fantastic,” Hsu said.
Of the nine developers that now hold environmental permits, four are local and the rest are European developers, with some of the latter ones applying for multiple projects.
World’s biggest offshore wind developer, Ørsted, has four projects located 35 to 60 kilometres off the Changhua coast with the total capacity of approx. 2.4GW.
“The government will now look to developers to support and drive the development of the local supply chain and local financing opportunities to successfully complete the projects,” Scott Hsu said.
Phase 3 of offshore development is expected to be released by the government by the end of 2019 and targets in that phase are expected to be an additional 5GW to 6GW of offshore power for commercial operation between 2026 and 2035.