Construction kicks off at 1.1GW Inch Cape wind farm

A 70-metre floating pontoon and quayside cranes will be part of the work needed to transform the port into an operations and maintenance base for the wind farm, which is owned in a 50-50 joint venture by ESB and Red Rock Renewables.

The monopiles each have a diameter of 11.5 metres, maximum height of 106 metres and maximum weight of 2,400 tonnes.

The Inch Cape site will consist of 72 Vestas 15MW turbines. These white mammoths measure 280 metres in height to blade tip, with a hub height of 145 metres. They have a swept area of more than 40,000m².

The monopiles are due to arrive in Scotland in about five weeks’ time and will be installed around 15 kilometres from the Angus coast.

Steel, coal and CO₂ in turbine manufacture

Wind turbines have grown massively since the first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, was installed in Denmark in 1991, consisting of 11 x 450kW turbines, each with a height of just 35 metres.

Today’s turbines are a different story, some 30 times greater in generation capacity and almost 10 times the height. Each 15MW turbine is made of around 3,200 tonnes of steel, which is still made in blast furnaces using between 0.6 and 0.8 tonnes of coking coal per tonne of steel.

This means that 2,624 tonnes of coking coal need to be burned per wind turbine, making a total amount of around 175,000 tonnes of coal burned for this one wind farm.

The amount of carbon dioxide emitted per tonne of coal burned is estimated at about 2.86 (various sources), which means that almost half a million tonnes of CO₂ were emitted in the manufacture of the turbines for the Inch Cape offshore wind farm.