Oh my! It’s certainly been an eventful week for Taiwan’s offshore wind development, both from current projects under construction and looking ahead to Round 3 auctions! First of all, it’s incredibly exciting to welcome the DLS-4200 to Taiwan. This means, at last, wpd’s 640MW Yunlin project can get started for real this season at last. She’s projected to start work on the 18th of June. Let’s wish the project and the crew our very best.

In other construction news, Orsted’s 900MW Greater Changhua 1 & 2a continues to cook with gas. 2/3 of the pinpiles and half the jackets are installed. Heerema’s Aegir is doing an incredible job. With 111WTGs it’s a big project and too soon to tell if the whole thing will get done this season, but at this pace, the foundations certainly will be no problem. 

For JERA/Corio/Swancor’s 376MW Formosa 2 we have a nice piece of video evidence that Bokalift 1 is hard at work. 8 out of 47 jackets installed it looks like as of end of May. Turbines, not yet. Don’t think they’ll get everything done this season, but it’s moving. 

Finally, we have work notices that the Bokalift 2 might be getting to work at CIP’s 100MW Changfang Xidao Phase 1 (for foundation installation) as soon as June 20th and the Bold Tern might be joining to do turbines as soon as July 1st. With only 10 turbines, no reason why this project will not be complete as long as the 2 made-in-Taiwan jackets from Century Steel shows up. 

The first of the brand new Round 3 (as opposed to leftover from Round 2) projects got their EIAs! Orsted’s Xu Feng 2&3 and CIP’s Taichung Fengmiao project both got approved on June 8, World Ocean Day. Yun-lin Ko has a nice roundup of the projects awaiting their 2nd reviews. My prediction: The auctions, when they finally roll around, will be competitive, but not that competitive, with 7 developers scrambling for 6 slots. 

Need a little extra weekend reading? I’ve made my interview with Director Chen of the Bureau of Energy, which was a premium article, free to read for everyone. For our subscribers, be sure to check out my latest in-depth analysis on how the global commodities price surge will affect Taiwan’s offshore wind development.

Looking beyond Taiwan, let’s keep an eye on Norway’s 88MW Hywind Tampen project. Due to be commissioned by the end of the year, it will be the biggest floating offshore wind farm in the world. As of June 7 four of the turbines have been assembled, and one has been towed into the North Sea and installed. The 8MW Siemens Gamesa turbines will be sitting on concrete spar-type foundations by Aker Solutions.