Qualla: Offshore wind farm He Dreiht

Offshore wind farm He Dreiht: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikeTango, CC0. In April 2017, the German energy company EnBW filed a bid for a patch of North Sea seabed and offered to build a 900-megawatt wind farm on it for a subsidy of zero. Not zero cents per kilowatt-hour above the market price. Zero. No guaranteed feed-in tariff, no premium under the Renewable Energy Sources Act - just the right to plug into the grid, plus whatever the wholesale electricity market would pay them. The bid won. The wind farm is called He Dreiht, Low German for 'it turns', and as of 2026 it is finishing construction 85 kilometers north of Borkum.

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Offshore wind farm He Dreiht: The Zero-Cent Bet

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikeTango, CC0. He Dreiht's zero-subsidy bid stunned the European energy industry. For years, offshore wind had been treated as a still-fragile technology that needed guaranteed pricing to attract capital. EnBW was effectively saying: turbines are now cheap enough, financing is now cheap enough,...

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Offshore wind farm He Dreiht: Bigger Blades, Fewer Towers

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikeTango, CC0. The Vestas V236-15.0 MW is a turbine designed to make zero-subsidy economics work. Its rotor is 236 meters across - wider than the London Eye is tall - and each unit produces 15 megawatts at full output. He Dreiht needs only 64 of them to reach 960 MW, where a farm built a decade...

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Offshore wind farm He Dreiht: The Money Behind the Turbines

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikeTango, CC0. In March 2023, EnBW made the final investment decision and immediately sold 49.9 percent of the farm. The buyers were a club of long-horizon institutional investors: Norway's sovereign wealth fund (through Norges Bank Investment Management), Allianz Capital Partners, and the Dani...

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Offshore wind farm He Dreiht: It Turns

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikeTango, CC0. Commissioning began in stages through 2025 and continues into 2026. From the deck of a passing ship - or, more often, from the window of a flight tracking the German coast toward Scandinavia - the He Dreiht turbines stand in a pattern like surveyor's pins driven into the sea. Eac...

Image: MikeTango | CC0