ScotWind leasing round

Crown Estate Scotland (CES) announced the results of the ScotWind leasing round on the 17th of January 2022. Eleven successful developers and consortia will now deliver the 17 sites which are a mixture of fixed and floating wind projects. The industry were expecting a capacity of around 10GW but the final total capacity for this round is now just under 25GW.

The huge leap in scale is due to the ever increasing size of offshore wind turbines. The Sectoral Offshore Wind Plan had set the hard limit for the round based on total seabed area which was not to exceed 8,600km2. The 17 sites amounted to 7,300km2 and, therefore, although the generating capacity was far in excess of the expected 10GW, the area limit was not reached as the turbine density was far higher than expected under the original plan from more than 4 years ago.

A further Clearing round increased the total number of sites to 20 with three additional projects off the East Coast of the Shetland Isles. This has increased the ScotWind round's total capacity to 27.6GW. Two of the additional sites have now merged into a single project, Arwen, bringing the total number of sites in the ScotWind easing round to 19 projects. 
A number of the developers have also increased the capacity of their ScotWind lease sites with two projects, Ossian and Caledonia, looking to add a further 1GW each and 400MW being added to Broadshore. The latest planning application sees the Muir Mhor project increase to 1,005MW (up from 798MW). All of these changes has increased the total capacity to of the ScotWind round to over 30GW.      

The listing below shows the developers on each of the 19 sites along with a map of Scotland showing the position of each lease area. 

The next step in the process involved each of the developers signing their Option Agreements from CES and to return them before the end of March 2022. All Option Agreements have now been signed and the developers involved will now proceed with site development activities which will start with the preparation of their planning applications to the Marine Directorate. The first ScotWind project to apply for a planning consent from the Scottish Government is the West of Orkney project and this has now been joined by the Ossian and Muir Mhor projects. (updated Dec 2024).