The challenge
DESNZ commissioned Grant Thornton to conduct a peer review of the departments existing offshore wind generation costs research, in line with the department’s policy to peer review key findings.
This peer review assessed and provided assurance to DESBZ regarding the robustness of four key elements:
- the overarching methodology
- outputs from amalgamated survey data against in-house benchmarks
- filter criteria and filter option selected by the initial work
- literature review by initial work
How we helped
Grant Thornton undertook a peer review of offshore wind costs data, owned and utilised by DESNZ and derived in a project commissioned in 2024. The original author surveyed offshore wind (OFW) developers to gather OFW costs and technical assumptions, and filtered these to produce low, medium, and high scenarios for each cost and technical assumption category.
A similar peer review of load factor calculations, including interrogating the methodology used to calculate load factors was also undertaken.
The results
The data from both exercises is critical to the UK offshore wind industry’s benchmarking process as these costs and load factors provide a publicly available evidence base to calculate strike prices for the Contracts for Difference (CfD) revenue support scheme. The report can be found on the Government website at the link below:
Offshore wind cost and technical assumptions: peer review - GOV.UK
About our team
Grant Thornton’s Energy Transition and Sustainability team comprises energy policy, regulatory, corporate finance and ESG specialists with deep experience across public and private sector. We advise on large-scale procurements, energy reform, commercial due diligence and transactions.
