Hornsea 3 OFTO Tender Set for 21 October as £8.5bn Project Nears Grid

The Hornsea 3 OFTO tender will launch on 21 October, Ofgem has confirmed, opening the race to own and operate the offshore transmission assets connecting Ørsted’s 2.9GW North Sea wind farm to the GB grid. The round will be the regulator’s fourteenth under the offshore transmission owner regime, and one of the largest yet to reach this stage.

What the Hornsea 3 OFTO tender actually covers

The offshore transmission owner (OFTO) regime separates the ownership of a wind farm’s grid connection assets from the developer once the project is commissioned. Ofgem runs a competitive tender to find a long-term owner for those assets, who then receives a regulated revenue stream for operating them. For Hornsea 3, that means the cables, substations and associated infrastructure carrying power from Ørsted’s Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm ashore.

Ofgem said Ørsted had met the regulatory conditions required for the tender to proceed, including receipt of payment and security from the developer. That box-ticking matters: previous rounds have slipped when developers have not fulfilled pre-conditions on schedule.

The 197-turbine array is due to be commissioned by the first quarter of 2028, which sets the rough outer boundary for when the OFTO transaction would need to complete. Investors bidding into this round will be pricing a long-dated, regulated infrastructure asset against that timeline.

The scale behind the Hornsea 3 OFTO tender process

The numbers behind this project give a sense of what is at stake. Hornsea 3 is an £8.5 billion infrastructure project, and once operational, it is projected to deliver enough renewable energy to power more than 3.3 million UK homes, according to the project’s own figures. At 2.9GW, it is among the largest offshore wind farms under development anywhere.

That scale feeds directly into the OFTO asset value. Grid connection assets for projects of this size are substantial, long-duration investments, and the regulated revenue they generate has historically attracted infrastructure funds and pension capital looking for stable, inflation-linked returns. Ofgem’s OFTO regime was designed precisely to mobilise that kind of patient money, and on that front the numbers broadly support the design: since the regime launched in 2009, winning bidders have invested over £11 billion in links connecting 27 offshore wind farms, according to an Ofgem official press release.

The pipeline ahead is larger still. The same Ofgem release put the potential volume of OFTO assets coming to market by 2030 at as much as £30 billion, as the current wave of offshore wind capacity moves from construction toward commissioning. Hornsea 3 is one of the earlier, larger projects in that queue, which means the October tender will draw scrutiny from the market as a pricing reference for deals to follow.

That context also raises a question worth keeping in view. The OFTO regime has generally functioned well as a mechanism for separating construction risk from long-term ownership, but the volume of transactions forecast between now and 2030 will test Ofgem’s capacity to run competitive processes and the market’s appetite to absorb them. A thin or concentrated bidder pool on any individual round would be a warning sign worth watching.

Ofgem shortlisted five bidders for a separate OFTO round earlier in 2026, which at least points to a functioning competitive market for now. Whether that depth holds as deal flow accelerates is a different question.

For the Hornsea 3 round specifically, the formal tender launch on 21 October will be the next concrete milestone. Prospective bidders who have not already registered an interest with Ofgem will need to move quickly once that process opens.