German local government-owned energy company, Trianel, announced today it has lodged a court appeal demanding damage payments from transmission system operator (TSO), TenneT.
Trianel’s claim is related to TenneT’s failure to install the DolWin1 export cable as scheduled. The DolWin1 installation project is already ten months late. When completed, the cable will link Trianel’s Borkum West 2 offshore wind farm to the land-based electricity network.
TenneT is responsible for building the offshore electricity network in the German North Sea. It has just announced another delay to DolWin1, after earlier announcements in May and June. The first two delays resulted in extra costs totalling a two digit million euro sum, said Trianel. The cost of the latest delay is not yet clear.
Until now, TenneT has insisted that DolWin1 would be completed by spring 2013. With this in mind, Trianel expected to finish construction of Borkum West 2 in the second quarter of 2013.
Trianel participated yesterday in a German federal parliamentary hearing about a draft law designed to re-assign financial liability in the case of delays to the installation of offshore export cables and/or cable outages.
The company argues that the draft, as currently worded, would prevent companies that are experiencing real financial losses due to cable delays from taking a TSO such as TenneT to court.
It also points out that for the purpose of claiming damages, the draft law assumes that an offshore wind farm is complete when foundations are installed and its offshore electricity substation is ready for operation. The latter represents a significant flaw, says Trianel, since it could result in a substation having to be maintained in an operational state - with electricity generated by diesel generators - for months until the associated cable is fully installed.
