BRITAIN BACKS PLAN FOR BIGGEST OFFSHORE WIND FARM IN WORLD
Hornsea Project 2 will generate enough power for 1.3 million homes
The British government has given the go-ahead to build the biggest offshore wind farm in the world, which will generate power for more than 1.3 million homes.
Danish renewables company Dong Energy made a successful bid for subsidy support for the Hornsea Two project, 90 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast.
Featuring 276-metre tall turbines, the farm is expected to come online in April 2023. Its sister farm, Hornsea One, is under construction and will be completed in 2020. Between them, they will have a generating capacity of 2.6 gigawatts, providing power to more than two million homes.
In a move that will have longterm implications for the energy industry, the subsidy rate the government will pay to Dong will be £57.50 (Dh280) a megawatt-hour – more than half of what was paid for energy from offshore wind farms in 2015.
It is also £35 per MWh cheaper than the subsidy the government has agreed to pay for energy from the troubled Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Cornwall. The wind farm is likely to be on stream years before Hinkley Point will start generating electricity.
The British government reaffirmed its commitment to the £20.3 billion project last year. The French energy group EDF and China’s government-owned nuclear firm were supposed to have the plant opened in 2025, but it is now unlikely to be operating until 2027.
Costs have also spiralled, with EDF admitting in July that it was £1.5bn over budget.
Renewables are now as competitive as other energy industries, partly because technological advances have meant that turbines are becoming bigger, as has generating capacity.
The 195 metre-tall turbines at the Burbo Bank Extension in the Irish Sea off Liverpool have a generating capacity of 8MW, and each full rotation of their 80-metre blades can power a home for 29 hours.
“People rightly focus on turbine size and that is undoubtedly the biggest cost driver of the projects,” said Matthew Wright, managing director for Dong Energy in the UK.
“You get economies of scale with the bigger projects.”
Because projects such as Hornsea share infrastructure with already operational farms, the marginal cost for more capacity is lower.
Reaction to the project across the environmental movement was positive.
Greenpeace said: “It’s important to celebrate progress, and this is a huge breakthrough for clean energy.”
Caroline Lucas, the co-leader of Britain’s Green Party, said: “This massive price drop for offshore wind is a huge boost for the renewables industry.”
But there was caution in some quarters about the rush to ditch nuclear power as part of the country’s energy mix.
The Financial Times observed in an editorial that “despite the mistakes made in the Hinkley Point deal, this does not obviate the argument for building nuclear plants to meet a part of the UK’s energy needs”.
“Despite the huge advances in renewable generation, and progress in dealing with challenges such as intermittency, it will still be a matter of decades before the system can function without traditional generation,” the newspaper said.