The UK seeks to install 3,500 offhsore turbines over the next decade
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is expected to kick start this week an ambitious £100 billion ($162 billion) development of the British seabed to install massive offshore wind farms.
The wind farms could, at least on paper, provide power to most of Britain’s households.
The Crown Estate, an independent body that owns most of the seabed around the UK shores, will announce this week, which consortia will get to develop the nine project zones, mostly in the North Sea, that will house these power plants.
The project is the most ambitious of its kind in the world, says the Guardian.
The biggest development is the Dogger Bank, an area about 100 kilometers (160 miles) off the north east Scottish coast, with a capacity of 10 gigawatts and is estimated to cost more than £30 billion to develop.
The UK, taking a queue from Denmark, is betting big on its offshore to green its generation portfolio. Near London on the Thames estuary Denmark’s DONG Energy, E.ON UK, the British unit of German utility E.ON and Masdar, the Abu Dhabi clean tech investment group, are developing the 613 megawatts London Array project.
The UK’s offshore ambitions face some obvious hurdles. One is cost. It cost on average $5.0 million per megawatt of capacity to develop an offshore wind farm.
Also, as we wrote here last summer, the UK lacks the cleantech supply chain to support such massive undertaking. Although the British government’s strong support could change that and convince key sector companies to open up plants.
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