The Hornsea One wind farm is now the largest offshore wind farm in the world. It is located roughly 75 miles off the east coast of Grimsby in the North Sea. The North Sea is a notoriously gusty stretch of open water where some of the world’s other large wind farms operate. They feed power back to the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Scandinavian countries.
As you can imagine, getting this farm running was no easy task! David Coussens, deputy operations manager for Hornsea One, said they had to “think creatively and come up with new ways of working to overcome the logistical and technical challenges of operating a massive power station 120km from the shore.”
The team responsible for operating the turbines have to spend four weeks at sea because of the farm’s distance from shore before returning to port where another team will head on out and take their place.
Coussens said: “Operating a wind farm this far offshore is unprecedented.”
Hornsea One will cover 407 square km, five times the size of the nearby city of Hull. It is now online and generating power but not yet running at full capacity as only 50 of the 174 Siemens Gamesa 7MW turbines are in operation. Even in this semi-operational state, the wind farm is able to generate enough electricity to power up to 287,000 homes.
Eventually, when fully operational, it’ll crank out enough power to supply clean electricity to over a million homes in the UK. According to Offshore Wind, turbine installation will continue through the end of the summer with the project expected to be completed by sometime in 2020. When all the turbines are spinning, the project will have a generating capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, more than double the capacity of the current largest offshore wind installation, which is also in the UK.
A Wind Europe report showed that the UK has the largest offshore wind generating capacity in Europe, with a generating capacity of 8.2 gigawatts. That accounts for 44% of all offshore wind capacity in Europe! All that capacity is one of the main reasons the UK has had an increasing success weaning itself off of coal.
Matthew Wright, UK managing director of Ørsted, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm builder, said:
The ability to generate clean electricity offshore at this scale is a globally significant milestone at a time when urgent action needs to be taken to tackle climate change.
