A new round of licenses has been awarded to successful bidders in Britain’s energy industry, allowing for the future development of thousands of offshore wind turbines, leading the way for the next phase of clean energy generation in the U.K.
The Crown Estate, owner of the U.K. seabed, has entered into an exclusive agreement with nine winning bidders to allow for at least 25GW of wind farms in nine different zones in the seas surrounding the U.K.; a consortium including Npower and Norway’s Skatkraft were awarded the license for the largest zone with potential for nine gigawatts of energy.
Called ’round three’, this latest issuance of licenses for offshore wind farms will be the biggest wind program yet announced by the Crown Estate and aims to speed up the creation of clean wind power on a mammoth scale.
The new zones slated for wind development beginning in 2014 at the earliest include Dogger Bank, the Bristol Channel, the Firth of Forth and the seas off Norfolk.
The development of new wind farms will no doubt be instrumental in helping to meet 15 per cent of the U.K.’s energy needs with renewable sources by 2020, a government-set target. Once installed, the turbines in the nine zones could generate up to 32 gigawatts, providing for a quarter of the country’s electricity usage. The project will help the U.K.’s economy shift to low-carbon and give it a tremendous boost, creating and supporting an estimated 70,000 jobs by 2020.
Several challenges loom on the horizon. The proposed sites are farther from shore and in deeper waters than any other project, and will prove to be a formidable engineering feat. As well, offshore connections to the national electricity grid are lacking and Britain currently has no large scale manufacturing plants for wind-turbines, something the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) laments if this new initiative is to benefit the economy as much as is hoped.
A history of demonstrating determination and ingenuity to overcome obstacles should prove valuable as Britain continues to be leaders in harnessing the power of the wind.
