Masdar’s Dudgeon wind farm brightens 6,000 homes in UK

Abu Dhabi / WAM

Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, announced on Thursday that its second large-scale offshore wind farm in the United Kingdom has started supplying electricity to British homes.
Around six thousand households are now receiving power from the Dudgeon Offshore Wind Farm after the project’s first turbine began operating today. Sixty-seven 6-megawatt (MW) turbines will be installed altogether, generating enough power to provide electricity to 400,000 homes.
Masdar has a 35 percent stake in Dudgeon with the Norwegian oil & gas company Statoil (35%) and Norway’s state-owned electricity
company Statkraft (30%).
“Thanks to the strength of the collaboration with our partners, the construction of Dudgeon is progressing as scheduled, and we’re delighted to see that the project is already delivering clean power to the UK National Grid,” said Bader Al Lamki, Executive Director for Clean Energy at Masdar. “The completion of Dudgeon will bring Masdar’s gross installed renewable energy capacity
in the UK to more than one
gigawatt.”
Margareth Ovrum, Executive Vice President of Technology, Projects and Drilling at Statoil, added: “This is a significant milestone for one of the largest offshore wind farms in Europe. I am particularly satisfied with the on-time deliveries and the HSE performance so far.”
Dudgeon represents Masdar’s biggest wind power investment in the UK after London Array, currently the world’s largest offshore wind power project in operation. With a capacity of 630MW, London Array was inaugurated in July 2013.
At Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in January, Masdar announced its acquisition from Statoil of a 25 per cent stake in its third UK-based wind project, the Hywind floating offshore wind farm in Scotland. The 30MW facility is expected to come on-stream by the end of this year.
Construction activity at Dudgeon ramped up last year, with the completion of the foundations for the project’s 67 wind turbines along with subsea cables and an offshore
substation.
The remaining wind turbine generators are expected to be installed by the fourth quarter of this year, when the
wind farm will become fully
operational.
Located 32 kilometres off the North Norfolk coast of England, the Dudgeon Offshore Wind Farm will have a total installed capacity of 402MW producing 1.73 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year.
“Building a profitable renewable portfolio on the foundation of 40 years of oil and gas experience is a competitive advantage,” said Stephen Bull, Statoil’s Senior Vice President for Offshore Wind. “We can leverage on our marine operations competence, our experience with complex projects and our supply chain. A lot of work remains, but seeing the first Dudgeon turbine producing electricity is very satisfying.”
Last May, the developers of Dudgeon jointly announced securing GBP1.3 billion in long-term financing for the project. Dudgeon is the first UK offshore wind project to obtain financing under the UK government’s ‘Contract for Difference’ (CfD) scheme.
Masdar’s clean energy division is a leading developer and owner of utility-scale, grid-connected renewable energy projects; remote applications providing energy access to communities away from the electricity grid; and carbon abatement projects. Since 2006, Masdar has invested in renewable energy projects with a combined value of US$8.5 billion; the company’s share of these projects is US$2.7 billion.
Masdar’s renewable energy projects span the UAE, Jordan, Mauritania, Egypt, Morocco, the UK, Serbia and Spain. The electricity generating capacity of these projects, which are either fully operational or under development, is 2.7 gigawatts (GW) gross.