Crown Estate Scotland offers 17 projects seabed rights for offshore wind

By Nina Chestney

LONDON (Reuters) -Crown Estate Scotland said on Monday it has offered seabed right agreements to 17 projects in its ScotWind leasing round which is aimed at supporting wind energy development.

Out of 74 applications from developers looking for the rights to build projects across the 15 areas of available seabed, option agreements have been made to companies including BP (LON:), SSE (LON:), Shell (LON:) New Energies and Scottish Power Renewables, TotalEnergies and Vattenfall.

Crown Estate Scotland manages the seabed around Scotland. Its ScotWind tender leases areas of the seabed around Scotland for wind farm developments. It is hoped that up to 10 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity will be built over the next decade due to the scheme.

It said that just under 700 million pounds ($957.88 million)will be paid by the successful applicants in option fees and passed to the Scottish government for public spending.

The area of seabed covered by the 17 projects is just over 7,000 km2. The projects include six for fixed offshore wind, 10 for floating wind and one mixed.

The agreements will now be finalised and developers will move forward with their plans. Crown Estate Scotland said it only grants full seabed leases when developers have all the necessary consents and planning permissions from the Scottish government and other bodies.

Should any application not progress to signing a full agreement, the next highest scoring application will instead be offered an option, Crown Estate Scotland added.

($1 = 0.7308 pounds)