Japan opens bids for floating wind farm auction: report

Auction winners will be selected in June 2021.

Japan officially launched its effort to seek participants in the nation’s first auction for a floating offshore wind farm, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The nation’s economy and land ministries will select the winner of the auction around June 2021 to construct floating turbines off the southern prefecture of Nagasaki. The deadline for bidding in the auction will be on 24 December.

Winning bidders will be chosen after consulting with experts on the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed business plans, according to a spokesman of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The capacity of the floating farm must be a minimum of 16.8MW whilst the feed-in tariff for the farm is set at $0.34 (JP¥36) per kilowatt hour.

The auction will be the first under Japan’s offshore wind promotion law, which took effect 1 April, 2019, as the nation aims to achieve the target of boosting renewable energy to 24% of its total power generation by 2030, from about 17% in 2019.

Here’s more from Bloomberg.