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Posted on 12/18/2006 4:19:39 AM PST by alnitak
The world's largest wind farm, capable of powering a third of London's three million households, is to be built off the coast of south east England.
The London Array wind farm, 12 miles (20km) off Kent and Essex, was given the green light by the Department of Trade and Industry today.
It will consist of 341 turbines and occupy an area of 90 square miles (232 sq km) between Margate and Clacton.
London Array, a consortium of Shell WindEnergy Ltd, E.On UK Renewables and Core Ltd, is behind the £1.5 billion, 1,000 megawatt project.
It claims the wind farm will avoid emissions of up to 1.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year and could make up to 10% of the UK Government's 2010 renewables targets.
A second wind farm, off the coast of Kent, was also given the go-ahead today.
The Thanet wind farm will be 7 miles (11km) from North Foreland on the Kent coast and will contain 100 turbines, occupying 13.5 square miles (35 sq km).
The £500 million project being developed by Warwick Energy is expected to be completed by 2008. It will supply electricity to around 240,000 homes.
I'm not really convinced by offshore wind, the economics don't seem to be there compared to onshore wind. However, it will be impressive from an engineering perspective!
The downloads section of their website has a PDF map showing the location.
Having these 2 things built should see us moving up the world capacity rankings a bit...
Wow, another feel-good white elephant for the nutbars to admire.
It sounds good. Dependency on oil can be reduced...but then how vulnerable would these windmills be to terrorism? I know nothing about this process, but assume there is some sort of energy storage accessory with this.
1.5 Billion sacificed to the Global Warming myth. But at least it will make a superb location for a Bond chase scene.
If Bond can get around all them dead birds.
Offshore sounds like the right answer.
Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off
Do you have economic data to back up your claims or are you just assuming that the wind energy is not competitive?
Have you seen the price tag on a 1000MW nuclear reactor of late?
A small bit. By the time this is built there will be 100 billion watts worth of land based windpower.
I just watched Mission Impossible 3 last night. They had a helicopter chase scene through a windmill farm. Pretty cool. You can about imagine the demise of one of the helicopters.
Wind power is so incredibly cost-stupid per kilowatt.
Dear alnitak,
An advantage of the off-shore farms is that they don't crowd out other land uses, since they're not on land. ;-)
This is taking up 90 sq miles to generate a gigawatt of electricity. Putting a farm like this off-shore might be less disruptive in many coastal areas (especially if placed far enough off-shore), and would avoid the issue of competition with other uses for land envisioned for these projects.
From other threads, it seems also that the wind off-shore is often stronger and more constant, which can help make up for the difficulty and cost of operating off-shore, and the need to transmit the electricity back to the shore.
sitetest
1.5Bn Pounds invested in wind energy sure beats 1.5Bn Pounds sent to the Middle East for oil.
Sitetest, I am aware of the postulated advantages of offshore, however I have not seen anyone come up with figures where these offset the higher construction and O&M costs.
"Offshore" seems to be the wind industry's version of fusion "it's coming soon".
Another factor is that offshore has always been said to need larger turbine sizes to make it economical. But turbine sizes seem to have peaked at 2.5 - 3MW (OK Repower have a 5MW but they have only sold about 6 of them). There is no incentive for manufacturers to invest in R&D for larger turbines at the moment because they can't meet the demand for onshore turbines in the < 3MW range. I expect this situation to persist for at least 3 years.
With all due respect, electricity and salt water don't "mix" very well.
We know that microscopic dust can degrade the metal components of wind-turbine-generators located in the desert. What do you think "salt air" will do to the copper windings, to the precision-ground teeth of the reduction gears and to the elecronic sensors and process-controlling circuit boards in a modern WTG?
And please don't forget how very difficult it is to repair a multi-ton turbine-generator located atop a thin steel column far, far above a storm-tossed sea.
Nevertheless, I do understand that, as long as the "feel-good science" crowd wants to throw money at our energy "problem", such Rube Goldberg devices WILL continue to be built...
how do you put a value,
on electricity, you can't count on?
at full value of European 'base load'
50 or so Euros per megawatt-hour,
capacity factor, 0.3
1000 megawatts
8760hours/yr
--->
131 million Euros per year, which is reasonable
Dear alnitak,
There was a thread a while back that was about a proposed off-shore wind farm in Massachusetts. Maybe Uncle Dave might remember it, and generate a ping for you. The folks had a solid business plan, and were ready to go. Opposition, as I recall, was political, spear-headed by Chappaquiddick Ted.
I'm not nearly qualified to judge the merits of a business plan for this sort of thing, but the folks who were willing to put their money into it thought the plan was a pretty good one, that they could generate electricity and sell it at market rates, recoup their costs, and make a profit.
As I said, I'm not qualified to judge the merits of this sort of thing, and thus, if there are folks willing to put up millions or billions of their own dollars to try it out, hey, it's only money, and in this particular case, IT WASN'T MINE! ;-)
sitetest
Dear pfony1,
These are technical issues, the "hows" of doing it.
In that there are at least a few folks willing to pony up lots of private dollars to try out their proposed solutions, I'm inclined to let 'em try.
sitetest
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