IKEA owner joins race to build Norway's first floating wind farms - Recharge
IKEA owner joins race to build Norway's first floating wind farms | Recharge
Ingka Group – the owner of furniture giant IKEA – will enter Norway’s race to deploy floating wind.
The group’s Ingka Investments arm has joined the UtsiraVIND consortium of companies bidding in the Utsira Nord tender process underway as part of the Norwegian government’s first award of large-sale offshore wind leases.
Ingka joined Japanese utility Kansai as a new member of the bidding group, which already included floating technology specialist Odfjell Oceanwind and renewables group Source Galileo.
Ingka has become a regular investor in clean energy projects across Europe and beyond, most recently as part of groups looking to deliver offshore wind in Sweden and Finland.
Ingka’s head of renewable energy Frederik de Jong said: “This partnership is a further step to expand our investment activities to address climate footprint reduction well beyond our retail consumption, and into the IKEA value chain."
Utsira Nord aims to tender off 1.5GW of acreage for three 500MW floating wind projects, a process that alongside a parallel same-sized first phase in the southern North Sea likely to go to fixed-bottom developments marks Norway’s first major offshore wind foray.
The winners of Utsira Nord are due to be named late this year after a qualitative selection process.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.