Nordic wind energy companies, Havgul Clean Energy of Norway and Sweden’s Triventus Wind Power have merged, giving the combined entity a pipeline of 15 offshore and onshore projects with a capacity of 1.5 gigawatts.
The newly formed Havgul Nordic AS will hold the projects that are based in Finland, Norway and Sweden. “The transaction will facilitate a reduction in overall development costs while allowing for knowledge sharing and greater economies of scale during critical development and construction phases,” Havgul Clean Energy said.
Havgul Nordic’s projects range from small unpermitted sites to large-scale and fully permitted sites including the 350-megawatt Havsul 1 Offshore and the 200-MW Tonstad wind farm, as well as three in Findland.
Havgul Nordic’s main shareholders include the Sustainable Technologies Fund and Investinor AS, which includes the Norwegian government, the Swedish National Pension Funds, Kapan Pension Fund and the Heinz Family as prominent investors.
“We are aiming to establish one of the lowest cost and highest return wind developers in the Nordic,” said Harald Dirdal, CEO of Havgul Nordic. “The Norwegian and Swedish governments have recently increased their renewable energy targets and we expect to be well positioned to exploit this highly positive regulatory driver in the years ahead.
“Despite weak wholesale electricity pricing, the Nordic region offers attractive regulatory and commercial characteristics, the Nordic economies are amongst the most successful macroeconomic performers of the developed world over the last 10 years. “As such, they represent an ideal investment particularly with respect to the recent currency weakness in the Norwegian and Swedish Kroner.
Dirdal also said that he expects Finland to be an attractive market due to its attractive feed-in tariff based regulatory system “combined with new model wind turbines ideally suited to this consistent, favourable and low wind speed environment.”
In Norway, he said that falling oil prices have created unused capacity in the country’s well-developed offshore industry. “Norway is expected to utilise this know-how to exploit the nascent domestic and rest of Europe offshore wind opportunity,” he said.
Norway and Sweden have a joint system that issues tradable certificates to power companies for each megawatt-hour of renewable energy they produce. The two countries recently agreed to raise their clean-energy target by 2 terawatt hours by 2020.