Britain Awards Contracts for Wind Farm Initiative
By Landon Thomas, Jr. and Robert P. Walzer
LONDON — In an ambitious bid to revamp Britain’s energy strategy, Prime Minister Gordon Brown awarded contracts to major energy companies that are to erect wind farms along Britain’s extensive coastline.
The project will be one of the biggest wind power initiatives anywhere in the world. Beginning construction in 2014, it promises to be a bold, even risky bet to erect thousands of turbines along Britain’s 12,000 kilometers, or 7,500 miles, of turbulent waterfront.
For Mr. Brown — who remains embattled politically, just months before a general election — the wind initiative also promises to burnish his environmental credentials and generate jobs, as many as 70,000 by 2020 it is believed, at a time that the country is in desperate need of them.
Bringing the plan to fruition, however, will require resolving the technological complexities of building and maintaining wind turbines in waters that are deeper (more than 30 meters, or 100 feet, in most cases), rougher and farther offshore (in one case nearly 300 kilometers, or 180 miles) than ever attempted.
It will require a massive ratcheting up of the offshore wind industry by existing onshore wind behemoths like Siemens of Germany and Vestas of Denmark. Only 1 percent of the world’s 150 gigawatts of wind capacity is offshore.
And, according to the Carbon Trust, a group that advises the British government, the initiative will require capital investments estimated to reach $120 billion. That money will have to be raised by the energy companies, which hope to eventually recoup their investments through profits on electricity sold.
The plan is aimed at helping Britain reduce carbon emissions and achieve its pledge of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. To meet that goal, 40 percent of electricity generation will have to come from renewable sources, mostly from offshore wind, which today supplies only 2 percent of the country’s energy needs.
The government’s offshore wind plan entails building about 25 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, from 688 megawatts (less than one gigawatt) operating today in Britain, plus nearly twice that much already under construction.
“Our policies in support of offshore wind energy have already put us ahead of every other country in the world,” said Mr. Brown at an event in Essex, where the winning bids were announced. “This new round of licenses provides a substantial new platform for investing in U.K. industrial capacity.”
The biggest of the nine development zone awards — for the Dogger Bank area, located 100 kilometers off the east coast of Britain — went to a consortium consisting of RWE Npower of Britain, Scottish and Southern Energy of Britain and the Norwegian energy groups, Statkrat and Statoil Hydro.
The site alone is expected to host 9 gigawatts of wind power at a cost of about $48 billion.
One of the two second-biggest zones, with an estimated potential for 7 gigawatts off the coast of Norfolk in the southern North Sea, was won by Scottish Power of Britain and Vattenfall of Sweden.
The other 4.2 gigawatt site in the Irish Sea was won by Centrica of Britain and the RES Group
Participants in other ventures, which were awarded by the Crown Estate, a trust that owns Britain’s territorial seabed, include Sea Energy of Britain, Siemens and Hochtief of Germany and EDP of Portugal.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity for the offshore wind industry,” said Peter Madigan, the British Wind Energy Association’s head of offshore renewables. “This will create a big and viable market for offshore so that what you’ll see is a decoupling of the two supply chains between on and offshore and companies building specific offshore wind equipment.”
By the peak years of building, the plan will require about 2.5 of the 220 meter-high turbines to be built per day to reach the goal of about 6,000 turbines in total, according to Carbon Trust, a group that advises the British government.
The strategy will also be tested by the need for better offshore and onshore grid infrastructure.
“There is no understating the scale of the challenge of this scheme,” said Benj Sykes, who develops renewable energy technology at the Carbon Trust. Referring to the underwater tunnel linking Britain and France, he said, “It’s like building nearly a Chunnel a year for the next 10 years.”
Correction: January 9, 2010
An earlier version of this article posted online misstated the country where Vestas, a wind-turbine producer, is based. It is Denmark, not Spain. It also misstated the number of turbines to be built in a project off the British coast and the name of a group that estimated the pace of construction. The project is to total about 6,000 turbines, not 1,000, and the forecast came from Carbon Trust, a group financed by the British government. (Carbon Trust Investments is its venture-capital arm.)
