The tough struggle for the offshore wind power industry

Ten years ago, the shipyards in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania built the world's first converter stations for offshore wind farms. These were pioneering projects to convert the electricity from the sea from alternating current to direct current for low-loss transport on land.

In 2016, the company Nordic Yards of the Russian investor Vitali Yussufow sold the three shipyards in Wismar, Rostock-Warnemünde and Stralsund to the Genting Hong Kong group. However, he had the three locations, which were called MV shipyards from 2016 to 2022 and built cruise ships, filed for bankruptcy in January as a result of the pandemic.

Since then, hope has been germinating in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in the German energy sector that converter stations could be built again on the German Baltic Sea coast in the future. The market for these large systems is now considerably larger in Germany and Europe than it was in the past decade. Above all, it is about German shipyards gaining a foothold in the offshore wind power market again. Not a single German shipyard is building more equipment and ships for this part of the energy market these days, unlike in the past decade. Network operators such as Tennet and Amprion currently do not know where to get the converter stations for the rapidly growing European market. The network operator Tennet recently installed the DolWin kappa system north of Emden, which was built in Cadiz, Spain. The next Tennet converter station comes from China.

According to WELT information from the industry, the Belgian company Smulders wants to use the southern part of the shipyard in Rostock-Warnemünde to build converter stations there in the future especially for the European market. Smulders would either rent or buy space there. Time is of the essence – there are currently a dozen tenders for such systems running across Europe. Whether Smulders, which belongs to the French construction group Eiffage, gets a chance depends on the federal government. Out of the insolvency, the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks (BImA) bought the shipyard in Rostock-Warnemünde, which has been an arsenal of the German Navy since August 1st.

According to WELT information, the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks supports a rapid separation of the area for Smulders, which is not required by the naval arsenal. The Federal Ministry of Defense, on the other hand, is said to be still hesitating. “We see the need, the topic is high in the federal government,” said the federal maritime coordinator, Claudia Müller (Greens), WELT. Last Monday, a video conference was held with various federal agencies and with the potential investor for Rostock-Warnemünde. Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) also took part in the conference.

The Hamburg insolvency administrator Christoph Morgen had sold the three MV shipyards to new investors in the past few months: "A promising bidder intends to build offshore converter platforms on the southern part of the site to meet the already known need for platforms for offshore wind energy -Construction with converter stations from European production," he told WELT. "As far as I know, this division of the site would be possible if a heavy-duty quay were built in the southern area. There is therefore still a chance for an industrial solution for Rostock in the southern part of the former MV shipyard site.” From Morgen’s point of view, however, there is “a great deal of time pressure so that the next offshore platforms for Europe are not in Asia but in Rostock-Warnemünde can be built".

Since the beginning of the last decade, the industry has built up a wide range of production facilities for the components of offshore wind farms and their shore connections at German shipyards on the North and Baltic Seas. This new industry largely disappeared again after the expansion of offshore wind power in German waters was curbed by the then grand coalition of the Union and the SPD. A larger industrial core remained only in Cuxhaven around the wind turbine plant of Siemens Gamesa. In Nordenham, on the other hand, the Steelwind company, which belongs to the Dillinger Group, manufactures foundation tubes for offshore wind turbines, so-called monopiles.

While the offshore industry and the German shipyards have not yet come together again, several civil shipbuilding companies have gone bankrupt during the pandemic. Some of them, like Pella Sietas in Hamburg and most recently Fosen Yard in Emden, disappeared from the market altogether.

Germany alone wants to massively expand its generation capacity in offshore wind farms in the coming years, from currently around eight gigawatts to 30 gigawatts by 2030 and 70 gigawatts by 2045. Many other European countries, especially Great Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands, do too , are expanding their offshore wind power capacity. From the point of view of the network operators, this will lead to bottlenecks in the shore connections. "As a transmission system operator, we urgently need the capacity and experience of the German and European shipyards to expand the connection systems for offshore wind energy," says Peter Barth, head of the offshore wind power division at Amprion in Dortmund. "And in turn, the market could offer shipyards long-term economic prospects."