Innogy chooses newly unveiled 14MW turbine for Sofia offshore windfarm

Innogy has selected Siemens Gamesa’s recently unveiled 14MW turbine to power its 1.4GW Sofia offshore wind project in the North Sea.

The turbine will have 108-metre-long blades, giving it a rotor diameter of 222 metres, and feature a direct drive generator – hence its designation as the SG 14-222 DD. It will be the world’s most powerful, taking the title from the 12MW Haliade-X model currently undergoing testing in the UK and the Netherlands.

The Sofia offshore windfarm, located on Dogger Bank in the North Sea, will be made up of 100 turbines, each standing 247 metres tall. Offshore construction will begin in 2023, with the turbines hitting the market the following year.

Sven Utermöhlen, senior vice president for offshore renewables operations at Innogy, said: “The selection of these state-of-the-art offshore wind turbines for Sofia, our largest offshore wind development project, reflects our ambition to strive for continuous innovation.

“Siemens Gamesa’s towering 14 MW machine is a perfect match for our flagship Sofia project, together cementing offshore wind‘s central role in the world’s clean energy future. This turbine embodies the impressive technology we need to build our ground-breaking project, that is further from shore and more technically challenging than any of its predecessors.”

Energy and clean growth minister Kwasi Kwateng said: “The UK has invested more in offshore wind than any other country and is already home to the world’s largest offshore wind farms. Now the UK will be the first European nation to boast this cutting-edge turbine technology at Sofia offshore windfarm.

“Offshore wind will play a vital role in a future net-zero UK economy, and already supplies 10 per cent of UK electricity demand – a figure we expect to double by the middle of the decade.”

Sofia was originally developed as part of the Dogger Bank project by the Forewind consortium comprising SSE, RWE, Equinor (then Statoil) and Statkraft. The project was at one point expected to deliver 9GW of capacity across eight 1.2GW phases, although four of these were eventually abandoned.

In 2016, RWE spun off its renewables, network and retail business into the new subsidiary Innogy. The following year, the Teesside B phase of the Dogger Bank project was taken over by Innogy and renamed to Sofia. Meanwhile, Statkraft sold its share in Dogger Bank to SSE and Equinor and left them to develop the remaining three phases.

Sofia and the rest of the Innogy’s renewable portfolio is due to be returned to RWE at the end of the June. The transfer is part of a wider asset swap deal that saw RWE sell its majority stake in Innogy to Eon, partly in exchange for Eon’s own renewable portfolio.

Sofia and three remaining phases of the Dogger Bank project all secured Contracts for Difference in the most recent auction in September 2019 at strike prices of around £40/MWh (2012 prices). In October, SSE and Equinor selected the GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X turbine for Dogger Bank.