Ministers moot opening up CfDs to repowered wind farms

The government is looking at opening up Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions to schemes to repower ageing onshore wind farms.

In a consultation paper, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) outlines a series of proposed changes to the future rounds of the government’s scheme, which has supported the delivery of 30GW of new renewable generation so far over the past decade.

These tweaks include allowing fully repowered onshore wind farms to compete for CfDs and floating offshore wind projects delivered on a phased basis.

The paper states that only fully repowered schemes, which involve the total replacement of a wind farm’s turbines, will qualify for support through a CfD.

Fully repowering sites, particularly those first-generation projects now wearing out, involves upfront capital costs that are likely to be similar to those faced by new build wind farms, it explains. Replacing older turbines with more modern models increases the output that can be delivered from existing sites.

However, DESNZ has decided not to allow repowered landfill gas sites to benefit from CfDs because the capital cost of replacing their turbines are less expensive than those for onshore wind.

Allowing repowered onshore wind farms into Allocation Round 7 (AR7), which is pencilled in for 2025, means that schemes will start to be overhauled from 2027 onwards. DESNZ forecasts a pipeline of 1.3GW of onshore wind that could be supported.

The paper also says that offshore wind projects could be eligible for CfDs when they need to be repowered.

DESNZ seeks views too on whether floating offshore wind projects should be phased over several ARs rather than in a single CfD.

It says phasing could reduce the build out risks for an emerging technology, which has seen only around 200MW of capacity deployed worldwide to date and relies on a yet to be industrialised construction process.

Enabling floating offshore wind projects, which are being planned on a much bigger scale than the first generation of fixed-bottom farms, to be developed in phases would reduce the risk that the supply chain cannot deliver.