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The Crown Estate has launched a competitive tender to find a new developer for the Morgan offshore wind site in the Irish Sea, months after the previous developers abandoned the project. The up to 1.5GW site, which could power around 1.5 million homes, was returned to the market on 24 July through what the Crown Estate is calling an accelerated process, designed to preserve the development progress already made and to keep the scheme on track despite the change of ownership.
Why the site is back on the market
Morgan had been under development by a joint venture between the German utility EnBW and JERA Nex bp, but both walked away from the scheme earlier this year, leaving one of the more advanced offshore wind sites in UK waters without a developer. This is a retender of an existing site rather than a fresh leasing round. Rather than fold the site into a future round, the Crown Estate has chosen to re-tender it on its own, moving quickly to return it to market and maintain momentum. Gus Jaspert, managing director for marine at the Crown Estate, described Morgan as a strategically important project that had already reached significant milestones, and said the priority had been to move at pace and offer developers a project with substantial consenting and grid progress in place.
What a new developer would inherit
Morgan secured a Development Consent Order for its wind farm asset in August 2025, and is awaiting a decision on a separate DCO application for its transmission assets, a joint application with the neighbouring 480MW Morecambe wind farm, now expected in September. It also holds a grid connection agreement with the National Energy System Operator. The tender uses a rising clock auction in which bids form a Site Exclusivity Fee, payable only once the project enters lease and then spread over 20 years from the start of the lease. The Crown Estate says this structure is intended to de-risk the development phase, when developers typically carry heavy upfront costs, and the phased fee is a notable departure from the large option-fee model used in earlier leasing rounds.
Timing and what comes next
Bidders are expected to submit over the summer, with an auction and the selection of a preferred bidder anticipated towards the end of the year, meaning rights could be awarded by the close of 2026. The Morgan tender is separate from the Crown Estate’s planned Offshore Wind Leasing Round 6, confirmed in March, which will offer around 6GW of capacity off the North East of England and is expected to begin in the first half of 2027. Taken together, the two processes signal an effort to keep new UK offshore wind capacity moving through the pipeline at a time when developers have grown more cautious about cost and delivery risk, the same pressures that lay behind Morgan losing its original backers.
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