The offshore wind farm, incorporating 12 turbines, generated the equivalent of one billion kilowatt hours of climate-friendly power for the German transmission grid, equivalent to the annual power consumption of 285,000 households.
alpha ventus has been generating power for the grid since 2009 when it was developed by the consortium of EWE, E.ON and Vattenfall. Regular operations commenced in April 2010 and during 2011-2013 alpha ventus achieved a total of 12,675 full load hours. The average yield of the offshore wind farm in 2011 through 2013 was 253.14 GWh per annum, exceeding the forecast yield by approximately 10 per cent and achieving a capacity factor of 48.1 percent. The annual yield in 2013 amounted to 224.6 gigawatt hours, for the first time falling 3.3 per cent below the forecast average annual yield.
The operator consortium of EWE, E.ON and Vattenfall looks back over three positive years of regular operations.
“Offshore is not yet routine” said Wilfried Hube, CEO of wind farm operator DOTI. “The economic, safe and environment-friendly operation of an offshore wind farm in the North Sea continues to be our key goal. We are pleased that the results for 2013 are better overall than we had still been expecting in September. The two storms “Christian” and “Xaver” generated good yields during the last quarter.”
Mr Hube added that the further expansion of offshore wind power requires the right political framework to be in place and that the offshore target of 6.5 GW installed capacity by 2020 remains ambitious. However the three follow-up projects to alpha ventus show that the energy utilities are doing their share.
These follow up projects consist of EWE’s Riffgat offshore wind farm near Borkum, E.ON’s project at Amrumbank West north of Heligoland in the German Bight and Vattenfall’s facility to the west of the island of Sylt. The Riffgat offshore wind farm was completed in July 2013 and is now feeding clean power into the German grid. It consists of 30 turbines with a total output of 108MW. The Amrumbank West project will consist of 80 wind turbines with a total of 288MW. Work commenced on this project in January 2014. The DanTysk offshore wind farm to the west of Sylt will generate 288MW from 80 turbines. The foundations were installed in 2013 and the installation of the turbines will start in spring 2014.
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