Fleets of incredibly large wind turbines could produce a third of all UK power by 2030

[n2doc]

The UK has the biggest offshore wind industry in the world, by far.

But if predictions from some wind farm builders come true, it will become even more enormous—both in its capacity to produce power and by sheer size of the machines involved—over the next 15 years. The country has built 3.7 gigawatts of offshore wind power generating capacity in the last five years alone: enough to power three million homes, according to Benj Sykes, who leads asset management at Dong Energy’s wind business for the UK, Germany, and Denmark.

He told Quartz that there were enough projects in the pipeline to more than double that amount to between 10 and 11 gigawatts by 2020. Ten years after that, the company envisages wind turbines will have a capacity of 30 gigawatts, generating 35% of the UK’s electricity.

That’s an “aspirational number” Sykes said, but it’s achievable, so long as costs continue to fall, he said.

The scale of some of these projects is hard to conceive. Take, for example, a construction project in Liverpool Bay scheduled to begin next year. It will use 8-megawatt turbines that are so massive they cannot be transported over land, only by ship.

more

http://qz.com/553674/fleets-of-incredibly-large-wind-turbines-could-produce-a-third-of-all-uk-power-by-2030/

[packman]

1. My God, what will that do to the earth's rotation

and think of all that possible wind leakage from those things?

I fully expect a wackadoodle right winger to say the wind turbines are responsible in some way for climate change.

[LouisvilleDem]

2. Counting down...

...and waiting for someone to scream "Peak Neodymium!"