Guidehouse Supports North Sea Wind Power Hub Programme with Topical Agenda

The North Sea Wind Power Hub (NSWPH) Programme consortium, supported by Guidehouse and consisting of TenneT, Energinet, and Gasunie, aims to facilitate the development of the world’s first offshore energy hub, integrating offshore wind connection and interconnections between countries using green hydrogen.

NSWPH recently published a topical agenda aimed at accelerating offshore wind deployment in the North Sea. The topical agenda identifies key policy topics that must be addressed to ultimately arrive at a full enabling framework that can provide necessary investment certainty to the project stakeholders. These include:

• Main principles: Frameworks defining the outline of the regulatory environment, such as offshore wind targets and the general market set-up of cost-benefit analysis
• Scope of the first project: For example, location, technology choices, size, etc.
• Cost & benefit: An agreed framework for assessing cost-benefit analysis and cost-sharing among the involved countries
• Investment framework: The necessary support schemes, financing, cost recovery, and the energy market outlook
• Legal framework: Enforces the conclusions from the previous topics through contractual arrangements between the project stakeholders

Guidehouse has actively supported NSWPH developments since 2017 and was awarded the opportunity to provide assistance in structured discussions with policymakers to realize the North Sea Wind Power Hub in 2020. Joint development of the topical agenda and the resulting discussion papers are the core elements of this engagement.