Crown Estate Scotland announced the outcome of its application process for ScotWind Leasing, the first Scottish offshore wind leasing round in over a decade and the first ever since the management of offshore wind rights were devolved to Scotland.

Highlights include:

• 17 projects have been selected out of a total of 74 applications, and have now been offered option agreements which reserve the rights to specific areas of seabed
• A total of just under £700m will be paid by the successful applicants in option fees and passed to the Scottish Government for public spending
• The area of seabed covered by the 17 projects is just over 7,000km2 (a maximum of 8,600km2 was made available through the Scottish Government’s Sectoral Marine Plan)

Separately, the UK Government announced that floating offshore wind projects are to receive a share of £31 million Government funding to help drive deployment of the clean technology. Some 11 successful projects are receiving a share of the money which is matched by more than £30 million from industry, to boost the sector by £60 million, the Business Department (Beis) said.

The funding, of up to £10 million per project, aims to support research and development of technology for floating offshore wind, and bring down the costs of building and deploying the renewable power source more quickly.

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