The year 2024 is set to see a record 60 gigawatts of offshore wind projects worldwide, including the Chinese market. Although non-price criteria are playing an increasing role in tenders, price will be ”a huge theme”, predicts Søren Lassen, head of offshore wind analysis at research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, in an interview with Marketwire.

”This is a year with a lot of focus on how much support offshore wind should get. It’s very fragmented in terms of pricing in the tenders, and locally you see very different trends. Price will be a huge theme, and it will be really exciting to see the results of the tenders,” says Lassen during a wind turbine conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Of the 60 gigawatts scheduled this year, he expects the majority to be successful in the sense that subsidies will be granted. However, outstanding information makes it difficult to assess the quality of some of the offerings.

”Some markets are difficult to assess right now because we don’t have all the criteria we need. There are still a lot of unknowns about some of the tenders, including the tenders in Denmark,” Lassen says.

According to Wood Mackenzie, price is the deciding factor for more than half of the capacity planned to be awarded this year. Therefore, price will determine who wins - and therefore the returns developers are willing to build projects for.

In addition to developers competing against each other for individual projects, there is also a greater competition for the capacity to build the projects. Many of the tenders call for projects to be built in 2028, 2029 and 2030.

”If everyone who wins says they want to build in 2030, then you have a problem. It can’t be done. There may be some adjustments and dynamics around all these individual tenders. It will be interesting to see how the lack of capacity makes the pieces fall into place in relation to the individual projects,” says Lassen.