Jörg Peters walks across the green Weser dyke. He stops and explains what he can see. On the horizon is the silhouette of Bremerhaven with the striking Sail City building, which is supposed to look like a spinnaker sail billowing in the wind. The Climate House, a few architectural sins from the 1970s, massive container cranes. The Weser, which flows here in a wide arc towards the North Sea.
Opposite, on the Lower Saxony bank, the quay of the wind turbine manufacturer Steelwind gleams in the sun. On the Bremerhaven side, however, there is nothing except a yellow excavator that is currently reinforcing the dyke. “It’s a bit bitter,” says Peters. If it were up to him, things would soon look different here.
The 56-year-old head of the planning department in Bremen City Hall wants to have a large port terminal built right on the “Blexer Bogen” of the Weser. An “energy port” with a quay edge hundreds of meters long. There will also be a ramp over the dyke and an adjacent road that will connect the new terminal with the adjacent commercial area.
90 hectares that were formerly part of a regional airport that was closed in 2016 and on which, according to the hope of the red-green-red Senate of the Hanseatic city, as many individual parts as possible of the gigantic wind turbines that are to be anchored in the thousands in the offshore wind farms on the bottom of the North Sea in the coming years will be produced.
The wind turbines in question have an output of 15 to 20 megawatts, whose foundations, pylons, nacelles, gearboxes and rotors are so large that they can only be transported to the ports by road with enormous effort, and which therefore have to be produced as close to the water as possible. There are not many suitable locations for this in Germany. The Federal Association for Offshore Wind Power (BWO) names Cuxhaven, where the existing offshore industrial center is to be expanded soon, Wilhelmshaven, whose deep-water port offers the best conditions, and Bremerhaven.
The expansion of these ports for the offshore industry is a prerequisite for Germany to be able to participate in the added value that comes with the expansion of offshore wind energy, says BWO Managing Director Stefan Thimm. And he stresses: “We see great potential in the Energy Port Bremerhaven for the expansion of offshore wind energy in Germany.”
A sentence that goes down quite well on the Weser. The state of Bremen is currently fighting on several fronts for the construction of its energy port. With the traffic light coalition, which, in the view of Mayor Andreas Bovenschulte (SPD), is currently letting Bremen down. With the CDU opposition in the Hanseatic city, which accuses the Senate of a lack of commitment to the offshore port. With the Bremen environmentalists, who are already keeping a close eye on these plans. The Bremerhaven side of the Blexer Bogen is part of a nature reserve. A circumstance that has already ruined Jörg Peters’ port plans.
Jörg Peters and Bremerhaven’s economic development officer Nils Schnorrenberger had already drawn up the first drafts for such an infrastructure project on the Weser, costing hundreds of millions of euros, in 2009. With an Offshore Terminal Bremerhaven (OTB), the state of Bremen wanted to address structural weakness, deindustrialization and unemployment in its two cities. The hesitant attitude of the then federal government towards offshore wind power and the associated interim crisis in the industry, which also set Bremerhaven back far, thwarted the plan. All that remained in the Weserbogen were the plant test benches of the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems.
Bremen’s offshore port plans, however, failed miserably in 2019 due to a ruling by the Bremen administrative judges. They upheld a lawsuit brought by the nature conservation association BUND against the OTB. Two years later, in November 2021, the Higher Administrative Court also rejected the construction. The judges cited, among other things, a lack of need for an offshore port as justification. Bremen’s dream of a new port era on the Weser was dead as a doornail at that moment. Then times changed.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. And the traffic light government in Berlin increased the expansion targets for offshore wind power tenfold. By 2030, the offshore industry is now expected to install at least 30 gigawatts of capacity in the North and Baltic Seas, and by 2045, this figure is expected to rise to 70 gigawatts. Current status: 8.8 gigawatts.
A challenge that, from the point of view of the Bremen Senate, the government of Lower Saxony, which is responsible for the expansion of the ports in Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven, and the wind power lobby, can definitely only be met with additional port capacities for the production, installation and maintenance of offshore wind turbines.
In the middle of the 2023 state election campaign, Senate President Bovenschulte made a second attempt. He presented a new potential study for an offshore port in Bremerhaven. The failed OTB became the Energy Port in the report. A new label for an old project, for Bremen’s hope of still benefiting from the challenges of the energy transition.
Bovenschulte’s study, prepared by the Hamburg-based consulting firm Hanseatic Transport Consultancy (HTC), found that following the federal government’s decisions on wind power, there is now a considerable need for additional base ports for the offshore industry in the North Sea. And this despite the fact that the competition – Cuxhaven, Eemshaven in the Netherlands and Esbjerg in Denmark – has now moved far ahead of Bremerhaven. “The existing capacities are not sufficient,” judged HTC boss Jan Ninnemann, and recommended that Bremen expand “the sooner the better.” It is important “to position yourself early, to appear on the map of potential investors.”
It is understandable that the Bremen Senate has been pushing ahead with the Energy Port since then. A new “justification of need” for the construction of the wind power terminal is to be presented this summer. With the help of the Federal Council, the Senate President also wants to ensure that the Federal Government declares the port infrastructure required for their construction to be a matter of “overriding public interest” in addition to offshore wind power plants.
“The energy transition,” Bovenschulte explains the initiative, “is a time-critical issue in which we basically cannot afford to lose a single player.” If the federal government is serious about this, “then we need the Energy Port in Bremerhaven.”
An appeal that has not yet been fully received by the traffic light coalition. At the beginning of the month, it initially rejected Bovenschulte’s proposal to the Bundesrat. “The instrument of overriding public interest cannot be used everywhere,” said a spokeswoman for the Green-led Ministry of Economic Affairs. She referred to the study “Energy Ports of the Future” that the federal government had commissioned. Results are expected to be available in May 2025.
On the Weser dyke, Bremen’s planning director Jörg Peters has to think for a moment about whether he will live to see the opening of an offshore terminal in his professional life. Then he says: “That would be nice.”
