Jun 3, 2026 · 35 min · 10 segments
Vattenfall head of wind Catrin Jung tells reNEWS Editor Stephen Dunne how the company has made corporate PPA-based revenue models work on several offshore wind farms and her mixed views on the drive…
Catrin JungGuest
Stephen DunneHost
Vattenfall is one of the few developers that made the non-CFD business case work around the merchant projects, Nordlicht being the big example of that, which you reached FID on earlier this year.
Could you maybe talk us through how exactly you were able to unlock that merchant-based business case and what are the lessons from it for similar projects in the future?
I would say it started with Hollandseekust South, which was the first project that was built on a zero-bit basis.
And we are, as I said in the start, we are an integrated company, so we are quite used to having long positions.
And that makes it easier, I would say, because we're used to having those long positions and to trade in the market.
And maybe also to go through a phase where the PPA market is not so liquid and wait for demand to kick in.
We took the FID, owning the full wind parks, the 1.5 gigawatt, and at the time we hardly had any secured revenue flow.
But we believe that the levelized energy costs of the project are so low that we will find off-takers when the off-take market kicks in.
And we do believe the market will go into energy transition and then there will be the demand for energy.
But we can allow ourselves a bit of time between FID, the financial investment decision, and actually closing positions at a level that fits to the cost and margin expectation that we have.
One of the things you hear about merchant business cases is the risk, particularly around negative prices in the market.
The Netherlands being a prime example of that where prices quite regularly turn negative.
How do you deal with that on Holland's East Coast South? And you're obviously looking ahead to the I'm Eudon Mair Alpha project under the Zevonk partnership.
Vattenfall is one of the few developers that made the non-CFD business case work around the merchant projects, Nordlicht being the big example of that, which you reached FID on earlier this year.
Could you maybe talk us through how exactly you were able to unlock that merchant-based business case and what are the lessons from it for similar projects in the future?
I would say it started with Hollandseekust South, which was the first project that was built on a zero-bit basis.
And we are, as I said in the start, we are an integrated company, so we are quite used to having long positions.
And that makes it easier, I would say, because we're used to having those long positions and to trade in the market.
And maybe also to go through a phase where the PPA market is not so liquid and wait for demand to kick in.
We took the FID, owning the full wind parks, the 1.5 gigawatt, and at the time we hardly had any secured revenue flow.
But we believe that the levelized energy costs of the project are so low that we will find off-takers when the off-take market kicks in.
And we do believe the market will go into energy transition and then there will be the demand for energy.
But we can allow ourselves a bit of time between FID, the financial investment decision, and actually closing positions at a level that fits to the cost and margin expectation that we have.
One of the things you hear about merchant business cases is the risk, particularly around negative prices in the market.
The Netherlands being a prime example of that where prices quite regularly turn negative.
How do you deal with that on Holland's East Coast South? And you're obviously looking ahead to the I'm Eudon Mair Alpha project under the Zevonk partnership.
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