Oceanex talks $10 billion NSW floating offshore wind plans, and huge supply-chain task

Offshore wind farm developer Oceanex Energy has offered new insight into some of its gigawatt-scale plans for the New South Wales coast, ahead of the release of a major report that will map out the enormous task of scaling up an entirely new – for Australia, at least – renewables sector.

Oceanex, which was established in 2020 by two of the founders of what will likely be Australia’s first operational offshore wind farm, the 2GW Star of the South in Victoria, last year revealed plans to develop more than 9GW of offshore and floating wind farms in Australia.

Some 7.5GW of that number is planned for off the coast of New South Wales, strategically located for the impending exit of the state’s fleet of coal generators, particularly in the Hunter region.

To that end, an extensive Supply Chain mapping report commissioned by Oceanex was previewed this week at a private industry event hosted by HunterNet Co-operative, ahead of its release in a couple of weeks’ time.

The Oceanex team briefed HunterNet on the company’s plans for its Novocastrian wind farm – a $10 billion 130-turbine floating wind project proposed for around 30km off the Newcastle coast.

Oceanex CEO and co-founder Andy Evans told the meeting the company is hoping to begin construction on the Novocastrian project in 2028, in the process creating around 3,000 engineering and manufacturing jobs.

But one of the main purposes of the briefing, as HunterNet Co-op’s Boris Novak put it on LinkedIn on Thursday, was to “provide some granularity for industry and specialist domains, demystifying what work needs to be done. On aggregate, a huge task lies ahead.

“The message to regulators, planners, government decision makers, and elected representatives, is that you need to get your skates on to permit and enable developers and industry to step up to the challenge.

“For industry, we need to work together to make this happen, there is no other way.”

That’s certainly the message that Oceanex’s Evans hopes to convey, particularly given his first-hand experience of how slowly the wheels of progress turn in Australia when it comes to offshore wind.

Having worked alongside Oceanex co-founder Peter Sgardelis on Star of the South – Evans and Sgardelis each hold a 15% share in the project via their investment companies – Evans notes that by the time that project is built and generating power off the coast of Gippsland in Victoria it will have taken at least 16 years to complete.

“Granted, that was back when people didn’t even know that the words ‘offshore’ and ‘wind farm’ could go together,” Evans told RenewEconomy on Thursday, “but nearly 10 years later there’s till a lot of work needs to be done to get the industry up and running.”

Last week’s announcement from Victoria was a good start – the state Labor government set a 9GW offshore wind target for the state, working up from 2GW installed by 2030 and 4GW by 2035.

But Evans says a lot will depend on the federal government, with the vast majority of offshore wind turbines proposed for installation in Commonwealth waters.

And he says both state and federal governments will also have to ensure that they have enough resources, internally, to assess and process project applications quickly enough to meet such targets as Victoria has put in place.

And once all the paper work is taken care off, there will need to be a whole work force and supply chain built around the massive projects, with plenty of opportunities for Australia to capitalise.

“There will be more than a million tonnes of steel needed in the foundation structures and about 10,000 welding hours per floating foundation structure,” Evans told the HunterNet briefing.

“There will have to be international supply chain involvement, because a lot of the technology has been developed overseas, but our aim is to optimise the supply chain so we can get as much of it done locally as possible,” he said.