Acceptance of bids in the next Dutch offshore auction will last until 14 March. After the closure of the notification process, the Government’s Entrepreneurship Promotion Agency (RVO) is to indicate how many investors have submitted their applications.
In the conditions of the auction there is a provision that the winning investor is obliged to start the production of energy by 2023. Other criteria include experience in the construction of offshore wind turbines.
Participation in the auction without subsidies has already been confirmed by the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, which is also the beneficiary of an earlier Dutch auction in which no energy buy-back guarantee was provided.
The first two offshore auctions in the Netherlands – 700 MW each for distribution – took place in 2016. One was won by the Danish energy company Orsted (formerly Dong Energy) and the other by a consortium of Shell and the energy company Eneco.
The target set by the Dutch government by 2020 is to build onshore wind farms with a total capacity of 6 GW and to commission offshore wind farms with a capacity of 4. 5 GW by 2023.