- Official signing of the contract between TenneT and four cooperation partners in Berlin to develop the North Sea as a hub for sustainable and independent European energy production
- Long-term framework agreements will secure resources needed to build grid connections for North Sea wind farms that will generate as much electricity as 28 large-scale power plants
- The high-tech core of the converter components to be manufactured exclusively at European production sites
- With three more offshore projects in the German North Sea, TenneT complements the recent award of 11 to 14 converter systems of 2 gigawatts each
Top representatives of the transmission system operator TenneT, the Hitachi Energy/Petrofac co-operation and the three consortium partnerships GE/Sembcorp (SMOP), GE/McDermott and Siemens Energy/Dragados today officially signed the contracts in Berlin to seal Europe’s largest-ever tender award for energy transition infrastructure. The total volume of the contracts for the components of the 14 systems amounts to around €30 billion. The result will be a transmission capacity of offshore wind energy in the German and Dutch North Sea that will generate as much electricity as 28 large-scale power plants.
TenneT has thereby completed the process of awarding contracts for the sea- and land-based converter stations for a total of 14 offshore grid connection systems, which was launched in August 2022. TenneT had already awarded 11 of these systems at the end of March, eight of them in the Netherlands and three in Germany. Three more systems in Germany were added today. These 14 systems are to be realized by 2031. Their “core components”, meaning the innovative two-gigawatt technology for converting alternating current into direct current and back, will be manufactured exclusively at European production sites of the consortiums’ members in all projects. With a contract of this magnitude, Europe will be taking a global lead – in terms of both technology and production – in a key sector of tomorrow’s energy supply.
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