East Anglia Gets World’s Largset Offshore Wind Farm, Says NUTS 2 Shale Gas
No, seriously, NUTS 2 is a thing. But first let’s get to the world’s largest offshore wind farm-to-be. Earlier this week the UK greenlighted an offshore wind farm called East Anglia One, which they’re billing as one of the biggest wind farms in the world.
What’s with the qualifier? If built as planned the new project will sport 240 wind turbines. That tops the London Array, which is the current global offshore record holder (a proposed expansion of the Array has been shelved for now, btw).
World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm
The new East Anglia offshore wind farm project was announced by the UK Department of Energy & Climate Change earlier this week.
While that agency bills it as a 240-turbine project, if you check out the project information at the UK’s National Infrastructure Planning Portal it’s even more impressive.
As of this writing, the plans call for up to 325 wind turbines with an installed capacity of 1200 megawatts, located about 43 kilometers off the coast of Suffolk. It will cover an area of about 300 km.
In addition to the turbines, the project includes offshore collector and converter stations, up to four 73-kilometer seabed cables, and whatever else is needed for a National Grid connection at the Bramford Substation.
At Bramford the plans actually call for up to eight onshore cable ducts, although only four are needed for East Anglia One.
That’s because, as the name of the project suggests, this is just the beginning.
More And More Offshore Wind Power
The developer of East Anglia One is a joint venture between the energy developer Scottish Power Renewables (Part of Iberdrola Group) and Sweden’s Vattenfall Wind Power state-owned utility company.
Under the moniker East Anglia Offshore Wind Limited, the venture has the rights to develop about 7,200 MW in offshore wind farm capacity in the East Anglia zone.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s enough offshore wind power to keep more than 4 million typical homes humming along.
Space has already been staked out for more offshore wind farms, namely East Anglia Three and Four. We’re not sure what happened to Two but the company is aiming at a total of six wind farms.
And More Shale Gas, Too?
As for the shale gas angle, it has been a truth universally acknowledged that carbon assets in the ground must be in want of a way out, so despite the Department of Energy & Climate Change’s enthusiastic embrace of wind power, the UK is still set on exploiting its shale gas reserves.
Just last month, DECC issued new proposals aimed at simplifying approvals for shale gas and oil development in the UK.
The move comes despite mounting evidence that links oil and gas fracking to earthquakes in the UK as well as earthquakes here in the US.
However, it’s of a piece with DECC’s policymaking record. Earlier this year the agency launched an ambitious UK solar plan, but that was part of a broader energy roadmap update that included plans for more nuclear energy, too.
NUTS 2 Fracking in East Anglia
We could go on but it’s time to explain about NUTS 2.
NUTS stands for Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics, with is an EU thing so we won’t get into the details here, except to note that East Anglia is classified as a NUTS 2 region, and the fracking issue has come to a boil in East Anglia this year.
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British Conservative politicians love fracking – free money for landowners like themselves -, but it’s immensely unpopular. The oil and gas industry has nowhere near the clout that it has in the USA. Offshore wind is a fairly pricey option, but it’s politically on the line of least resistance, and is happening on a huge scale.
Without meaning to, the UK is playing the role for offshore wind that Germany fulfilled for pv solar: the sugar daddy who gets the price down to affordable for everybody else.
NUTS is not a TLA! Sorry, TLA stands for three letter acronym. I’ll post, sit in the corner and feel bad for wasting Cleantechnica server storage.
What is a typical home?