UK Expands Its Commitment to Massive Offshore Wind Power. By Jeremy Lovell, ClimateWire, January 11, 2010. "The U.K. government has announced the winners of the next major expansion round of offshore wind power as part of its ambitious plans to more than quintuple the amount of wind-driven electricity generation within a decade and help slash the nation's carbon emissions. The nine sites in the third round of offshore licenses mostly dotted around the North Sea of the United Kingdom's east coast are supposed to be able to produce about 32 gigawatts of electricity by 2020, compared to the 4 gigawatts already operating on and offshore and the 1.7 gigawatts under construction. (A gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, is the equivalent output of one large nuclear power plant.) 'Our island has one of the best wind energy resources in Europe, and today's news shows we are creating the right conditions for the energy industry to invest in harnessing it,' Energy and Climate Change Minister Ed Miliband said. 'This is one of the strongest signals yet that the U.K. is locked irreversibly into a low-carbon, energy-secure, prosperous future,' he added...
"Construction on the new sites -- at least one of which is in a highly sensitive environmental area -- is supposed to begin during 2014, with completion just six years later. In the meantime, the United Kingdom faces other pressing power problems because almost a quarter of the country's 80 GW of electricity capacity is likely to be retired by 2016 due to old age. Another 15 GW is either closed or severely restricted under E.U. plant emission regulations. In the past decade, the country has become increasingly reliant on dwindling supplies of natural gas imported from the North Sea fields, so the government is eager to find replacement power sources, among which wind features heavily... Experts raise the question of just how so many turbines can be produced and installed in such a short time and in stretches of sea that that are notorious for bad weather. With modern turbines averaging around 2.5 MW capacity, more than 10,000 such windmills may be necessary to meet the 32 GW planned -- although research is under way to build massive 10 MW machines."
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