Building a bidding strategy for Crown Estate North Sea offshore wind auction

Starting point

Ahead of a major Crown Estate seabed auction in the United Kingdom, a global energy company with a growing offshore wind ambition needed to decide where and how to compete. Multiple experienced developers with entrenched North Sea positions were expected to bid, including Ørsted, Equinor, Vattenfall, SSE, RWE, CIP, Total, Eni, Masdar, and Macquarie. Existing export capacity, transmission routes, and proximity to installed assets could materially shift cost curves and competitiveness.

Internally, the client had a view of its own North Sea infrastructure and offshore capabilities, but not a head-to-head view of how that translated into advantage or disadvantage against specific rivals in specific zones. Leadership needed to know which bidding areas were structurally favorable, which would likely attract the heaviest competition, and how to size projects and bids to balance return and win probability.

The question was not simply “how much to bid,” but “where do we have a right to win, against whom, at what scale, and why.”

‍

Approach

The client engaged a strategy and analytics team to build a competitive and synergy-led view of the auction landscape and translate it into a practical bid strategy. The team included Bhuvan Maingi, now at Strathen Group, as the lead delivery consultant.

The work began with infrastructure and footprint mapping. The team mapped known offshore wind projects, transmission assets, export cables, substations, and ports across the Crown Estate bidding regions. Against this, they overlaid the client’s offshore and onshore infrastructure footprint, including nearby oil and gas assets where capabilities, vessels, or bases could be repurposed.

Next, the team built a cost and synergy model. For each prospective site and zone, the model quantified distance to grid connection options, distance to candidate ports and operations bases, bathymetry and likely foundation types, and vessel and logistics requirements. These drivers were translated into levelized cost of energy impacts and capex and opex deltas for “with adjacency” versus “without adjacency” scenarios. The goal was to turn qualitative adjacency stories into quantified cost differences.

In parallel, the team led a competitive intelligence workstream focused on the major competitors likely to participate in the round. They profiled each player’s existing UK and North Sea positions, strategy signals, partnership patterns, balance sheet strength, and recent auction behavior. They assessed which zones were most likely to attract interest from which competitors and how aggressive those competitors might be on price and scale.

The two lenses were then brought together in scenario analysis. For priority zones, the team ran cases that combined:

• Different project sizes and phasing
• Alternative assumptions on which specific competitors would bid and how strongly
• The client’s own synergy and cost positions under each layout

This allowed leadership to compare a small number of clear options: which bidding areas to prioritize, which to treat as secondary, and how to size projects to retain attractive returns under plausible competitive pressure.

The findings were synthesized into a bid strategy and investment story. The final recommendations set out preferred zones, project sizes, and rationale, supported by maps, cost comparisons, and competitor assessments that showed where the client was advantaged or disadvantaged relative to competition. The work also highlighted zones where the client’s existing infrastructure did not confer advantage, helping leadership avoid spreading bids too thinly.

Instead of treating the seabed auction as a generic land grab, leadership focused bids where infrastructure synergies and the competitive field created a genuine right to win.

‍

Outcome

The engagement gave the client a structured, evidence-based way to approach a high-stakes seabed auction. Rather than relying on generic capacity targets or broad interest in offshore wind, leadership could see which zones aligned with its infrastructure footprint and how it stacked up against specific competitors.

The synergy-based cost model showed how adjacency to export routes, ports, and operations bases translated into real differences in levelized cost and project economics. This allowed the investment committee to distinguish between sites that looked similar on a map but very different on cost and risk once logistics and grid distance were accounted for.

The competitive view clarified where the company was likely to face multiple experienced developers, and where the field might be less crowded. By combining this with the cost model, the team helped the client select a focused set of target zones and project sizes, rather than a long list of marginal bids.

Internally, the bid strategy and supporting analysis created a common language across strategy, commercial, technical, and finance teams. Different stakeholders could challenge or adjust assumptions, but they were working from the same maps, cost drivers, and named competitor profiles.

The auction outcome sits with the client, but the work equipped leadership with a clear, defensible bid plan grounded in infrastructure realities, competitor behaviors, and scenario-led economics.

For offshore wind leaders, the shift was moving from “how much capacity do we want” to “where do we have structural advantage against this specific competitive set, and how do we express that in disciplined bids.”

This engagement continues to shape how Strathen Group advises on capital allocation in competitive auctions, using infrastructure adjacencies, cost modeling, and competitor behavior to focus bids where clients have a genuine structural right to win.