Two major offshore wind projects announced for UK

The Crown Estate – which owns the entire seabed around the UK to a distance of 12 nautical miles – said that three sites in the Celtic Sea between England and Ireland had reached the final stages of the leasing round and bidders will now progress to the final stage, which will involve an auction to bid for the three sites.

In this process the bidders have been asked to set out which ports they intend to work with to deliver the projects, specifically ‘integration ports’, where turbines will be mounted on large floating platforms before being towed out to sea, the Crown Estate says. 

They will need to be huge platforms, similar in size to a football pitch, with the height of the turbine towers projected at up to 300 metres tall – around the same height as The Shard in London (more than three times taller than Big Ben).

And this is just the first phase of development in the Celtic Sea, with the Crown Estate detailing plans to bring to market 20-30GW of offshore wind on offer by 2030.

“Since taking office, we have approved the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm project, and we are backing the industry even further so this cutting-edge technology can continue to thrive off the UK coastline,” said Energy secretary Ed Miliband. “More floating turbines in our waters means more clean, homegrown power that we control, delivering energy security for families and businesses.”

“Ports are critical to securing the social and economic benefits of the energy transition and we welcome this step forward in making floating wind a reality in UK waters,” said Richard Ballantyne, Chief Executive of the British Ports Association. “As an industry we will continue to work closely with Government, The Crown Estate and the renewable energy sector to deliver on our shared ambitions for offshore wind.”

Rampion the Second

The second announcement made in recent days is the expansion of the Rampion fixed-bottom wind farm off the south coast of England, near Brighton.

Its current 116 turbines will be almost doubled with another 90 set to be installed following Miliband’s decision to approve the scheme, which is being developed by energy company RWE on behalf of its joint venture partners, a Macquarie-led consortium and a subsidiary of Enbridge Inc, an American energy infrastructure firm.

Rampion 2 will cover an area of 160km^₂, which has been halved from the initial proposals of 315km^₂. Water depths vary from 15 metres to 60 metres.

Up to four offshore export cables will be buried in their own trenches under the seabed to take the electricity onshore, and inter-array cables will connect the turbines to three offshore substations.

It is claimed that the new turbines will generate enough power for 1 million homes and they should be online by 2030.