Europe's Offshore Wind Capacity Growing

New capacity edges down 5 pct from record 2013; industry body forecasts stable growth over 2015/6.

Europe's offshore wind capacity kept up a steady rate of growth in 2014 and should expand at a similar pace on average over the coming two years, an industry report said on Friday.

New capacity connected to the grid totalled 1,483 megawatts (MW), edging down from 1,567 MW in 2013 when a record number of turbines and wind farms were installed, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) said.

Total installed wind capacity now stands at around 8,045 MW, enough to cover 1 percent of Europe's electricity needs, it said.

"It is not surprising that we see a levelling off of installations in 2014 following a record year in 2013," EWEA Deputy Chief Executive Justin Wilkes said in a statement.

"The industry has seen exponential growth in the early part of this decade and this is a natural stabilising of that progress."

That stabilisation should extend through this year and next, the association indicated, with 12 projects currently under construction expected to increase capacity by a further 2,900 MW to 10,900 MW over the two-year period.

An EWEA spokesman said the bulk of those gains would be this year, and Wilkes urged policymakers to come up with stable long-term plans to avoid a stop/go pattern of capacity growth.

European governments have started to curb offshore power subsidies but utilities and institutional investors remain keen on offshore wind as a fast-growing power technology.

Britain accounted for almost 55 percent of new installations in Europe in 2014, but Germany is expected to grow faster this year.

Germany is due to raise offshore wind capacity to 3,000 MW in 2015 after reaching 2,350 MW last year, its engineering lobby VDMA said recently.

Wilkes said capacity growth in Europe should pick up substantially again from 2017 thanks to nine deals closed in 2014, of which four were billion-euro projects.

The largest to be completed in the near future will be German utility RWE's 576-MW Gwynt y Mor wind farm in North Wales and its 400-MW Global Tech 1 farm the German North Sea. Both are expected online in the first quarter of 2015.

Reporting by Nina Chestney