The eight bidders – Balfour Beatty, Blue Transmission, Cheung Kong Infrastructure, Green Energy Transmission, Mitsubishi, National Grid Offshore, Transmission Capital Partners and the Ventran Consortium – will compete for the links to the Gwynt y Môr, Lincs and Phase One of the London Array offshore wind farms.
These are three of the UK’s largest offshore wind farms, representing more than 1.4GW of renewable power. Ultimately, the winning bidders will then own and operate the links for the next 20 years.
The next stage of the process is to select a shortlist of bidders in the spring of this year that will then go through to the final stage to select the winning tenders this summer.
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 £1.9bn worth of offshore transmission links to connect some 2.8GW of offshore wind.
Onshore wind and grid queue targeted in 2030 energy plan
The comparison of cost of different generating plant and storage types in terms of their total capacity (GW & GWh) build and operating costs would...