alpha ventus

Alpha Ventus is Germany’s first offshore wind farm: a 60 MW demonstrator and research test field located in the German Bight roughly 45–60 km north of Borkum. Commissioned in 2010 and developed as a pilotscale learning site, the project was built expressly to trial two turbine suppliers and two foundation concepts rather than to be a standard commercial park. That experimental remit shaped its organisation, technology choices, and research programme. The site comprises twelve 5 MW machines (two different manufacturers) on mixed foundations (tripod and jacket variants) together with a small offshore substation; its internal collection network is 33 kV and the park is exported to shore via a three-phase AC cable to Hagermarsch. Alpha Ventus delivered important lessons on installation methods (pre-piling, jacket/tripod fabrication), foundation scour protection, and monitoring practices through the RAVE research initiative and the adjacent FINO1 platform. It also served as a legal and permitting precedent for later German projects. Commercially the park was a consortium project (DOTI) formed by EWE, E.ON and Vattenfall (E.ON’s renewables stake later transferred in industry reorganisations), and it was never a conventional auction/CfD commercial build — rather a subsidised test field with targeted research funding. In the mid-2020s the owners began formal planning for end-of-life options, including environmentally sensitive dismantling, reflecting the project’s finite test-field mission and the industry’s growing experience with decommissioning.