SSE Renewables and Equinor have decided to pull back from their plan to utilise the fourth phase of the world’s largest offshore wind farm to generate green hydrogen. The plan concerning Dodger Bank Wind Farm D in the UK will now focus on solely supplying electricity to the grids.
The firms launched the project’s fourth phase a year ago. It aims to add up to an additional 2GW of turbines to the 3.6GW now under construction at the massive UK North Sea wind farm.
According to the partners, Dogger Bank D has now secured a grid connection location in Yorkshire and is also considering potential hybrid connections with a European electricity market for the additional capacity, reported by Recharge.
“With the confirmation of an onshore grid connection location in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the option to direct the wind energy produced by Dogger Bank D towards hydrogen production, as publicly consulted on in Autumn 2023, has been retired from the project,” said SSE and Equinor.
Now that a grid connection’s location has been established, Dogger Bank D will focus on connecting to the electrical transmission system.
Ancient landmass to renewable energy hub
Dogger Bank is a solitary sandbank extending across Dutch, German, Danish, and UK waters in the middle of the southern North Sea.
Studies, signs of human habitation, vegetation, and mammal remains suggest that the region was once a geographical mass known as Doggerland that connected mainland Europe to Britain.
The region progressively turned into an island before the sea level rose following the last glacial (ice age) and was eventually submerged under water between 8,000 and 5,500 years ago.
The Dogger Bank Offshore Development Zone covers an area of about 8660 km² and has ocean depths ranging from 18 to 63 metres. It is situated between 290km off the east coast of Yorkshire.
The 3.6GW Dogger Bank Wind Farm is being built in three 1.2GW phases called Dogger Bank A, B, and C. SSE Renewables and Equinor announced plans to create a possible fourth phase of the Dogger Bank Wind Farm in February 2023. In October 20223, the project’s first turbine at Dogger Bank A began to rotate and generate power.
The offshore wind farm in the UK uses high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission to feed power into the national grid through Dogger Bank. This is the first time HVDC technology has been applied to a wind farm in the country.
Furthermore, the project will see the installation of the most powerful offshore wind turbine currently in operation, GE’s Haliade-X. Each turbine boasts an impressive power output of up to 14MW, with a single rotation of the blades capable of supplying electricity to a UK home for over two days.
When finished, Dogger Bank’s facility will comprise 277 offshore turbines that generate enough clean energy each year to power six million homes and save enough CO2 to replace 1.5 million cars off the road.
Focus on feeding electricity to the grid
In February 2024, Dogger Bank D welcomed confirmation of the placement of a grid link. The wind farm will be connected to Birkhill Wood, a 400kV projected new substation that will be constructed in Yorkshire’s East Riding as part of the Great Grid Upgrade project by the National Grid.
Since the East Riding of Yorkshire has been confirmed as the location of an onshore grid connection, the project’s option to use Dogger Bank D’s wind energy for hydrogen production – which was openly consulted on in the fall of 2023 – has now been dropped.
Since the project’s launch in February 2023, plans to create green hydrogen at a dedicated onshore facility have been investigated concurrently with the possibility of electrical transmission by Dogger Bank D.
According to the companies, Dogger Bank D will now “undertake a site selection process to identify potential cable corridors and where other onshore infrastructure may be sited for the grid connection”, said the project website.