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World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Opens Off Northwest England (reuters.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the bigger-is-better dept.

The world's largest offshore wind farm has opened off the northwest coast of England. "The wind farm has a capacity of 659 megawatts (MW), enough to power almost 600,000 homes, and overtakes the London Array off England's east cost which has a capacity of 630 MW," reports Reuters. From the report: The Walney Extension (as it is called) is made up of 87 turbines built by Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, and covers 145 square kilometers (55 square miles), which is equivalent to around 20,000 football pitches. The 40 eight-megawatt MHI Vestas turbines being used stand 195 meters (213 yards) tall and are the largest wind turbines in operation globally. Britain is the world's largest offshore wind market, hosting 36 percent of globally installed offshore wind capacity, data from the Global Wind Energy Council showed. Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014. The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years. You can view some drone footage of the offshore windfarm via Orsted.

5 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Realtime grid CO2 intensity map by sidetrack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    See also https://www.electricitymap.org... for realtime CO2 intensity of electricity production across a big chunk of the world... e.g. right now (morning peak), the UK's running on 28% gas, 24% nuclear, 19% wind, 8% coal, 4% solar.

    1. Re:Realtime grid CO2 intensity map by Alain+Williams · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Here is a real time G.B. National Grid Status, shows that wind is 15% (as I type).

    2. Re:Realtime grid CO2 intensity map by jabuzz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The UK is really lucky that it is the best spot in the entire world for tidal power, which unlike wind and solar is predictable and guaranteed. At least when the tide stop being predictable and guaranteed we have bigger problems than having no electricity.

      The UK could basically get most of it's energy from tidal if there was just the will to build it. Instead we get hung up about diminished salt flats for birds. Oh and the absolutely hilarious bit is that the Solway Firth is one of the better spots for tidal generation. Top spots are Bristol Channel with around 8GW, Pentland Firth with possibly as much as 20GW, the Mersey with around 1.5GW. Further being an island much of this generation can be paired up around the coast line to give fairly continuous power. Add in some additional pumped storage (there is a lot of capacity potential for that in the UK) and we are golden.

      Instead we pump ~30GBP billion into a nuclear power station that would generate about one quarter the output of a tidal scheme in the Bristol Channel which would be cheaper to boot.

  2. Re:Will this one lose money too? by nojayuk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, (etc.)

    Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.

    Offshore wind farm power availability is about 30% of dataplate so this new facility will produce, on average about 250MW, not the headline attention-grabbing absolute maximum of 659 MW. Some days it will produce a lot more, some days a lot less even if we need the electricity right then. The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions. Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.

  3. Re:Will this one lose money too? by nojayuk · · Score: 5, Informative

    I live in Ireland and don't want any radiation in the sea here.

    News that may shock you, I know but seawater is naturally radioactive, more than 10,000 Bequerels per cubic metre. Most of that activity is due to naturally-occurring potassium-40, the rest tends to be from various decay products from uranium-bearing rocks and other natural materials. A couple of Bq per cubic metre in seawater is from man-made sources, usually remnants from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Some more is waste isotopes dumped into the sewers by hospitals, ending up in outfalls near the coast in places like Boston (there was a panic by some people when I-131 was found in Boston harbour soon after the Fukushima reactors overheated and leaked radioactive material into the Pacific. It turned out to come from a hospital which didn't have to sequester radioactive waste the way a nuclear power plant legally has to).