OFGEM Announces Eight Bidders for Three More Offshore Transmission Projects

Ofgem has announced the eight bidders which have successfully qualified to compete for three more high-voltage transmission links with offshore wind farms as part of Ofgem E-Serve’s latest competitive tender process. Ultimately the winning bidders will then own and operate the links for the next 20 years.

Today’s announcement is the list of bidders which will compete for the links to the Gwynt y Môr, Lincs and London Array (phase 1) offshore windfarms. These are three of the UK’s largest offshore windfarms, representing over 1.4GW of renewable power. The next stage of the process is to select a shortlist of bidders in spring 2011, which will then go through to the final stage to select the winning tenders this summer*.

Ofgem E-Serve’s Managing Director – Commercial, Robert Hull, said: ”A strong field of bidders competing in this second tender round is further proof that the offshore regulatory regime is very successful in encouraging investment and attracting new players into the transmission sector.” This is the first stage in the second round of tenders in the GB offshore transmission regime, and follows the success of the first round for £1.1 billion of transmission links, which attracted almost £4 billion of investment appetite and is expected to deliver savings of around £350 million. Tenders for a further three projects – Humber Gateway, West of Duddon Sands and Race Bank – are expected to start next spring. In total these six projects represent £1.9 billion of offshore transmission links to connect some 2.8 GW of offshore wind.

The longlist of bidders that have qualified to proceed to the Qualification to Tender stage are:

1. Balfour Beatty Capital Ltd
2. Blue Transmission (a consortium of Macquarie Capital Group, Barclays Infrastructure Funds Management Ltd and Frontier Power Ltd)
3. Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Ltd/Hongkong Electric International Ltd
4. Green Energy Transmission (a consortium of Equitix Ltd and AMP Capital Investors Ltd)
5. Mitsubishi Corporation
6. National Grid Offshore Ltd
7. Transmission Capital Partners (a consortium of Transmission Capital Ltd, International Public Partnerships Ltd and Amber Infrastructure)
8. Ventran Consortium (a consortium of BRITEL Fund Trustees Ltd (as custodian of BT Pension Scheme) and Universtities Superannuation Scheme Ltd)

*The winning bidder for Gwynt y Môr will be selected later than the bidders for the other two projects, as construction is not as far advanced as for Lincs and London Array (phase 1).

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Source: ofgem, January 26, 2011