Mitsui & Co is buying a 50 percent stake in wind farm developer Yushan Energy Co (玉山能源), giving the Japanese trading house a stake in an offshore power project in Taiwan.
Yushan is a unit of Singapore-based Enterprize Energy Pte, which owns a 40 percent net interest in the Hai Long Offshore Wind (海龍離岸風電) development in the Taiwan Strait, Enterprize Energy said in an e-mailed statement.
The 300-megawatt project is still in the planning stage and might require US$1.8 billion to develop, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
Mitsui’s move would mark its first foray into the offshore wind industry in Taiwan. The company’s involvement would bring another major investor to the nation’s effort to secure additional energy supplies while phasing out nuclear power.
Taiwan’s spare generation capacity has narrowed so much in recent years that blackouts are an increasing risk.
Buffeted by strong breezes in the Taiwan Strait, the government picked seven companies last month to lead work on 3.8 gigawatts of offshore wind farms by 2025.
Those plants might require NT$962.5 billion (US$32.18 billion) of investment, the government estimates.
Northland Power Inc, a Toronto-based energy firm, owns 60 percent of the Hai Long 2 project, with Yushan holding the remainder.
A Mitsui official declined to disclose the price of its stake in Yushan or the total cost of developing the project.
The venture is expected to start commercial operations in 2024, the official said.
The plant is to sell electricity based on a 20-year feed-in tariff that has initially been fixed at US$199 per megawatt-hour, BNEF said.
Yushan sees potential for more work alongside the Hai Long windfarm. It has done work to identify areas for offshore wind farms and with Northland is “proceeding with the development of sites in the Changhua Sea area,” it said on its Web site.
“The projects will result in over 1,000 megawatts of offshore windpower being made available to the Taiwan electrical power grid,” it said.
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