Italian floating wind, green hydrogen newcomer plans 1.2 GW project offshore Bari

A recently established company that focuses on the development of renewable energy and green hydrogen projects has submitted an application for a maritime concession for a site offshore Bari. There, the Italy-based developer plans to build a 1.2 GW floating wind farm whose electricity would be used for hydrogen production on land.

Hope Group (Gruppo Hope) filed the application on 21 July, requesting a 30-year concession for an area located in the Southern Adriatic Sea, off the coast of the Municipality of Vieste and with connection works located in the sea and on land in the territory of the Municipality of Bari.

The project consists of 80 wind turbines installed on floating foundations. Each unit would have an output of 15 MW, making up for a total power generation capacity of 1,200 MW.

The floating wind farm will also include an offshore substation, from which a 400 kV export cable will run under the sea and to a landfall point in Bari.

In Bari, the wind farm would be connected to the National Transmission Grid (NTG) as well as to a green hydrogen production plant, according to the documents published by the Port Authority of the Port of Bari, which is now holding public consultation on the project.

Hope Group is a new company jointly founded by five Italian businesses: Nelke, Gardill, Ilirm, Engeo, and Basomaso, which have backgrounds in the fields of technology, finance, engineering, and media.

The company filed the application around the same time another Italian developer, Wind Energy Pozzallo (directly managed by Blunova), also requested a maritime concession for a floating wind project which could incorporate green hydrogen production. This application was submitted for a site in the Malta Channel.

Italy has seen numerous offshore wind applications being submitted to the Ministry of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility over the past several months, many of them for floating wind farms.

Some of the latest requests for concessions to build floating wind projects, apart from the ones from Hope Group and Blunova, were filed by Acciona, AvenHexicon, Falck Renewables and BlueFloat Energy, and Eni Plenitude and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP).

In November 2021, Italy’s Ministry of Ecological Transition announced that it had received 64 Expressions of Interest (EoI) for the development of floating offshore wind projects off the country’s coast.

More than 20 projects the Ministry reviewed by that time are located off the coast of Sicily and Sardinia, more than ten along the Adriatic coast, with the remainder distributed between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas.

The country currently has one offshore wind farm built in its waters, the 30 MW Taranto (or Beleolico) project, developed by Renexia.

The first offshore wind farm built in Italy – and the first such project in the Mediterranean – was inaugurated in April.