The world's largest offshore wind farm has begun operating
Environment — di Cecilia Bergamasco
The Walney Extension offshore wind farm, in the Irish Sea, has started generating electricity and will power 600,000 homes with clean energy.
The world's largest offshore wind farm has begun operating
The Walney Extension offshore wind farm, in the Irish Sea, has started generating electricity and will power 600,000 homes with clean energy.
In the Irish Sea, approximately 19 kilometres off the coast of Barrow-in-Furness, a small town in Cumbria, in the north-west of England, the blades of the offshore wind farm Walney Extension have begun turning — the largest ever built in the world.
From the Irish Sea, energy for more than half a million homes
Conceived by Danish energy company Ørsted (formerly DONG Energy) and its partners, the Danish pension funds PFA and PKA, the Walney Extension Offshore Wind Farm is a 659-megawatt (MW) project comprising 87 wind turbines capable of generating enough energy to power around 600,000 homes in the United Kingdom. The wind farm extends over an area of 145 square kilometres and uses more than 200 kilometres of cables to carry the energy generated by the offshore turbines to the national grid. For the very first time, the wind farm hosts turbines from different manufacturers: 40 turbines use the latest 8 MW technology produced by MHI Vestas, while the other 47 are 7 MW Siemens Gamesa turbines.
Wind farms boost employment
The construction phase of the wind farm began in 2012 and, despite the official opening, will be completed next year. Ørsted's project operations unit is based in the port of Barrow and in the coming years will become the operational hub responsible for the project's maintenance. From here, operations relating to three other offshore wind farms belonging to the same Danish energy company will also be coordinated — namely the Barrow, Walney and West of Duddon Sands wind farms, all located in the Irish Sea, off the coast of Cumbria. Together, the four offshore wind farms have a capacity of 1.5 gigawatts and will require constant maintenance, which will demand more than 250 direct jobs in the region over the 25 years that the developers have estimated the wind farm will operate.
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United Kingdom, leader in offshore wind
Matthew Wright, Managing Director of Ørsted UK, highlighted how the project was delivered on time and within budget. The north-western region is a strategic hub for offshore wind in the United Kingdom, a country that, as Wright himself reiterated, is the global leader in the sector. While in the last quarter of 2017 wind energy combined with solar became, for the very first time, the country's second-largest source of electricity after gas, in Scotland the first three months of 2018 had already recorded record levels of wind energy production.