The government has outlined its plans for amendments to the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme from Allocation Round 7 (AR7) and beyond.
Responding to a consultation launched back in January, the government will fully implement the proposal to enable CfD support for fully repowering projects in the next allocation round, ahead of a significant proportion of renewable assets reaching the end of their operational life in the late 2020s and throughout the 2030s.
Phasing, which has been available to fixed-based offshore wind projects, will now be extended to Floating Offshore Wind projects too for the next allocation round. This will help to provide greater flexibility during construction and de-risk project delivery.
Elsewhere, it will not introduce a pre-qualification process ahead of the next allocation round or amend the grounds for appeal. It is planning to take forward work to implement a fixed timeline for future rounds, however. It will also not implement hybrid metering in the CfD, wanting instead to ensure that it is clear how such assets could be treated in the wider system first.
Further considerations going forwards include working with stakeholders to develop a long-term solution to the eligible definition of floating offshore wind projects, and looking at how the CfD could better support projects connecting into multi-purpose interconnectors or bootstrap infrastructure. Finally, the current full CfD indexation to the Consumer Price Index was acknowledged as offering comparatively advantageous terms in what is an increasingly competitive global market, therefore the government is not planning to make any changes to indexation at this stage.
