Offshore wind farm contracts due to be announced

Multi-million-pound deals to build nine offshore windfarms will be announced this week.

The proposed locations have been published for months by the Crown Estate, but it is the winners of the contracts to develop the windfarms which will be revealed during the week.

The companies behind the winning bids have already been told but been asked to keep the news quiet until the official government announcement.

The sites are at the Moray Firth, Firth of Forth, Dogger Bank, Horn-sea, Norfolk, Hastings, the Isle of Wight, Bristol Channel and Irish Sea.

The biggest site is at Dogger Bank, about 100km off the north east coast, where wind farms with a capacity of 10GW – enough to power 10 million homes – are planned, at an estimated cost of more than £30 billion.

Successful applicants will carry out further scoping work to decide where exactly to build the farms before submitting planning applications. Construction is not expected to start until 2014 at the earliest.

A spokeswoman for the Crown Estate said the government body, which owns the UK's seabed, was holding a supply chain roadshow for British manufacturers around the country, starting later this month. Working with regional development authorities, companies will be informed what components will be needed by the energy companies to help British industry benefit from the construction programme.