A broad majority in the Danish Parliament reached an agreement on the construction and ownership of a new energy island in the North Sea on Thursday. The parties have agreed to build a physical island and not a platform, as Ørsted, among others, had argued for.
Ørsted has even previously stated that the solution that the politicians have now chosen could develop into a potential scandal.
- An artificial island in this context is risky business. We simply fear that this will become the IC4 case of offshore wind. That would be the worst case, said Ulrik Stridbæk, head of energy economics at Ørsted in January.
But the Liberal Party's climate spokesman Tommy Ahlers does not give much credit to that criticism.
- When Ørsted mentioned it as a potential IC4 scandal, I think it was overshooting the mark. There are some disagreements about which construction is the best. Our premise was that there should be an island where we could get some innovation and do something new, he says and continues:
- A steel structure simply does not create a basis for what we want to do. Therefore, there should be very strong arguments against an artificial island. Now a lot of time has been spent both on the part of the ministry, on the part of other external consultants and also on the part of us politicians trying to understand this risk. And we cannot see that the risk of one solution should be so significantly less than the other, says Tommy Ahlers.
Hope for export adventure
The industry organization Wind Denmark had proposed a solution where it was up to those who wanted to bid for the project in a tender what type of energy island they wanted to build. But now interested parties must bid for a project that involves an artificial island.
- I fully understand that position, but there was no support for that. However, I also believe that there is a desire that with such a large project as this, there is a bit of a hand in the bag from the start. There will still be a tender, but we have had a desire to make a few more decisions about the type of construction of the project, that is, that it should be an island, says Tommy Ahlers.
The climate rapporteur hopes that the upcoming energy island can become an export adventure for Denmark.
- We believe in this way of doing it with energy islands. We are talking about the fact that on a global scale, many hundreds of gigawatts of wind power must be built out at sea. We believe that being able to possess the knowledge to build these islands can be a great business adventure, says Tommy Ahlers.
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