Taipower inks deals for 900MW of offshore wind projects

The PPAs with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and China Steel Corp will last for 20 years.

Danish fund management company Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and China Steel Corp (CSC) have signed three 20-year power purchase agreements (PPAs) with the Taiwanese state-run power utility Taipower for three offshore wind projects with a total combined capacity of 900 MW. Project developers will now apply for construction permits, a procedure which is set to take between three and six months.

The three projects entail the 300 MW Chongneng, 552 MW Changfang and 48 MW Xidao wind parks, which are located off the Changhua coast in the Taiwan Strait. The first 100 MW of the Changfang project are scheduled for commissioning in 2021 and will be followed by the remaining 452 MW in 2023. As for Changfang and Xidao, they are both slated to enter commercial operation in 2024. The companies opted for a tiered tariff of TWD6,279/MWh (approximately US$204/MWh) for the first 10 years and a lower tariff of TWD4,142/MWh (US$135/MWh) for the remaining 10 years.

Taiwan aims to develop 5,500 MW of offshore wind capacity by 2025, most of which will be contributed by the Changhua projects (2,400 MW in total), currently expected between 2021 and 2025. It recently introduced a new feed-in-tariff (FiT) set at TWD5,516/MWh (about US$1.8c/kWh) for 20-year offshore wind power purchase agreements (PPAs) that will be signed in 2019 along with a tiered production cap: developers will receive 100% of FiT for production up to 4,200 annual full-load hours (i.e. 48% load factor), 75% of FiT for production from 4,200 to 4,500 annual full-load hours (48%-51% load factor) and 50% of FiT for production above 4,500 annual full-load hours (51%-plus load factor).

This article was originally published by Enerdata.