The opportunity

Typical development timelines for large offshore wind generation projects are 7-10 years, with only about one-third of this duration required for actual construction and commissioning.

Early project schedules depend heavily on the permitting requirements of statutory bodies whose timelines can be unpredictable. This uncertainty constrains DevEx budgets and often results in important engineering and design decision gates being framed with limited site-specific geodata.

Portico identified an opportunity to accelerate offshore wind development by directly acquiring site characterization and environmental datasets ahead of lease auction and award, thereby compressing the development phase and boosting project NPVs and bankability for project owners. 

The solution

Portico’s Managing Partners launched and operationalized a new venture focused on data acquisition using low-logistics and low-cost technologies on carefully selected offshore wind development sites.

Portico validated demand from Tier 1 offshore wind developers and partnered with leading experts in geoscience and geotechnics to design a proprietary site-selection and data specification methodology.

This methodology evaluates the critical technical and commercial components of potential offshore wind projects such as site conditions and wind resource, port and logistics infrastructure, revenue certainty, export infrastructure and grid integration.

The framework was then used to evaluate global upcoming leasing rounds and develop a multi-year project pipeline of data acquisition.