Construction has begun on the world’s biggest offshore windfarm, 120km off the coast of the northern English county of Yorkshire.
The first of Hornsea Project One’s 174 monopile support structures (pictured) has been installed at the site. When complete, it will have a capacity of 1.2GW, making it the world’s first offshore farm to have a capacity over 1GW.
The project is being developed by Denmark’s Ørsted, formally known as Dong Energy, and will produce enough power for over one million homes.
In April 2014 the UK government agreed to pay Ørsted a fixed price per KWh of electricity for Hornsea’s first 15 years of operation, after which the company will get the market price.
Duncan Clark, programme director for the project, said: "Onshore, we are continuing to construct the East Coast Hub which will serve as an operations and maintenance base for our existing wind farms in the area and both Hornsea Project One, and Project Two which we took a final investment decision on last year.
"These wind farms will not only greatly contribute to the UK’s goal of decarbonising our energy system, they are also bringing jobs and investment to Grimsby and the North East."
Hornsea Project One is expected to be operational in 2020.
When completed, Hornsea Projects One and Two will generate electricity for over 2.3 million UK homes.
Ørsted recently released its 2017 annual report, which showed a 17% increase in operating profit from 2016.
Image courtesy of Ørsted
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Go go Yorkshire!!
1.2 GW sounds impressive. But with a load-factor of about 50% it will be less than half of the output of one nuclear reactor.
As we should know, wind is a varying and unreliable source of energy, needing stable back-up.
Thus 1 MWh from wind is (much) less worth than 1 MWh from nuclear.