The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
£400m lease damages bid is thrown out
Acourt has thrown out an offshore wind lawsuit for £400m in damages over a contested ScotWind seabed lease off Aberdeenshire.
Ocean Winds, the FrancoSpanish joint venture company, took action in the Scottish Court of Session against BlueFloat Energy and its partner consortium which won seabed rights to the NE6 project in January 2022.
It claimed for £400m damages – profits it said it would have received from the wind farm had it won the lease.
The firm said the BlueFloat consortium made statements in its bid which were “grossly exaggerated, false and misleading” over its previous experience in floating offshore wind, linked to a project called WindFloat Atlantic off Portugal.
Court documents show BlueFloat “strenuously denies” this. The firm had no comment when approached by The Press and Journal.
Ocean Winds said these claims led to BlueFloat winning the ScotWind lease and gave Crown Estate Scotland, which manages the leasing round, cause for action as a breach of contract.
The judge, Lord Sandison, threw out the action in which Ocean Winds accused the BlueFloat consortium of an unlawful means conspiracy.
His decision was, in part, because there may have
been other bidders for the NE6 site and there was no guarantee Ocean Winds would have won in any case.
Other factors in the decision included the Statement of Commitment in the lease not being regarded as “any term of a contract” and was “at best some variety of precontractual representation”.
On the alleged misrepresentation, Lord Sandison said it is “not necessary to reach that conclusion” to decide
whether damages are owed. In his conclusions, however, he conceded that it is “possible” that the consortium “coincidentally and independently advanced very similar, if not identical, hypothetical faslehoods”.
He decided not to dismiss the conspiracy claim as irrelevant because it is “far from impossible” to “infer the presence of the requisite ingredients of a conspiracy to injure”.
BlueFloat is partnered with Falck Renewables
– now knows as Renantis – on the NE6 project, which has since been rebranded as Broadshore.
The project site lies 30 miles north of Fraserburgh.
Ocean Winds, a joint venture of Spain’s EDP Renewables and France’s Engie, was contacted for comment.
A spokesperson for the company said: “We are analysing the court decision that has been issued and have no further comments to make at the moment.”