British oil major BP, working to beef up its renewables business, has signed an exclusive consultancy agreement with Quaybridge, a UK-based renewables consultancy with expertise in offshore wind.
"The two will work together to advance BP’s global offshore wind portfolio as part of its zero-carbon growth strategy, and accelerate the building of in-house offshore wind knowledge for BP," BP said.
"As part of the new agreement, members of the Quaybridge team will work closely with BP’s Renewables Growth business development team. Quaybridge worked with the BP and EnBW teams and successfully won ‘preferred bidder’ status for the Mona and Morgan Irish Sea leases in the recent UK Round 4 leasing round," BP said.
The BP/EnBW consortium and Quaybridge are participating independently in the ongoing ScotWind leasing round for offshore wind leases in Scotland. This will not be in the scope of the consultancy agreement between BP and Quaybridge.
For ScotWind, Quaybridge has applied for acreage as part of the NextGen consortium, in partnership with Parkwind and Maple Power (a 50:50 joint venture between Enbridge Inc. and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board).
Commenting on the deal with Quaybridge, David Anderson, BP’s svp renewables growth said: “Investing in the right skills is critical to success. Quaybridge is trusted and respected in the offshore wind industry for their deep technical expertise and their entrepreneurial and agile spirit. We believe this partnership will give us a cutting edge in a hugely competitive industry as we look to accelerate our global portfolio and deliver our ambition to be a leader in offshore wind energy.”
Quaybridge was formed by renewables consultancy Everoze in 2018, drawing many years of offshore wind development expertise together into an agile multi-disciplinary team, spanning technical and consenting specialisms. Quaybridge’s services for BP will be global in nature, BP said.
BP entered the offshore wind arena last year when it bought into Norway-based Equinor's project to develop offshore wind farms in the US.
With its German partner EnBW, BP was recently named preferred bidder for two Irish sea leases in UK Round 4, with a total gross generating capacity of 3GW.
Also, BP is currently bidding with partners to develop offshore wind off the coasts of Scotland and Norway. BP said this week it would invest and 10 billion pounds if the ScotWind bid is successful.
By 2030 BP aims to have developed around 50GW of net renewable generating capacity, up from 3.3GW in 2020.
The strategy also includes plans to increase bp’s annual low carbon investment 10-fold, to around $5 billion a year, and also reducing oil and gas production by around 40% from 2019 to 2030.