• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Is Finally Operational

September 1, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

Hornsea 2, a wind farm off the coast of the UK, is now fully operational and ready to help power around 1.3 million U.K. homes. With 165 turbines covering an area of 462 square kilometers (roughly 178 square miles), it is officially the biggest offshore wind farm on the planet.

“The UK is one of the world leaders in offshore wind,” Patrick Harnett, program director for the Hornsea 2 wind farm, told BBC News. “This is very exciting after five years of work to have full commercial operations at the world’s largest offshore wind farm.”

Advertisement

The new farm’s claim to fame as the world’s largest will be short-lived, however. The Dogger Bank wind farm, which is due to start coming on stream next year, will eventually be able to power a whopping 6 million homes – more than four times the number powered by Hornsea 2.

Hornsea 2 is located about 89 kilometers (55 miles) offshore, and at that distance, it can be hard to appreciate just how big these babies are. Each of the 165 turbines rises about 200 meters (656 feet) above the sea, with each of the three blades stretching 81 meters (266 feet) across – each one is about the height of the Washington Monument and the width of … also the Washington Monument, actually, except rotating.

The announcement marks the completion of a project which first started delivering energy back in December 2021. A single rotation of the blades can reportedly power one UK home for 24 hours. Since each revolution takes just six seconds, that scales up to more than 14,000 homes every day, for every turbine.

Advertisement

That’s good news for a few reasons – the most obvious being the reduction in fossil fuel reliance. Renewable energy sources have been projected to reduce carbon emissions over the next three decades by a factor of up to twenty, and wind power in particular has a significantly higher energy return on investment than, say, coal. For every unit of energy invested in wind power, something like 44 units are returned as electricity, while the same input into coal would only yield about nine units of power.  

But Hornsea 2 is also good news for consumers. It has a capacity of more than 1.3 gigawatts, and as the world undergoes the current energy crisis – British energy bills are projected to soar by up to 80 percent next month – wind power stands as one of the cheapest forms of energy out there.

“The last time I checked it was roughly £450 per megawatt hour to buy electricity generated by gas,” Simon Evans from Carbon Brief, a website that follows renewable energy issues, told the BBC. “That’s about nine times more expensive than the current cost to build new renewable capacity.”

Advertisement

Hornsea 2’s launch comes at an auspicious time, with Europe’s access to gas being squeezed by sanctions on Russia. While the UK is one of the luckier nations in the continent – more than 96 percent of the country’s gas supplies come from sources other than Russia – they are still vulnerable to the international gas market volatility, giving yet more reasons to wean themselves off the fossil fuel.

“Current global events highlight more than ever the importance of landmark renewable energy projects like Hornsea 2,” Duncan Clark, head of the U.K. region at Ørsted, the company which owns the farm, told CNBC. The new farm will “[help] the UK increase the security and resilience of its energy supply and drive down costs for consumers by reducing dependence on expensive fossil fuels.” 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Japan’s struggling PM Suga steps down, sets stage for new leader
  2. Taliban sources say last Afghan holdout region has fallen
  3. VW’s Skoda to stop production at Czech plants for a week due to chip shortage
  4. Diageo sees boost to margins as bars, restaurants open

Source Link: World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Is Finally Operational

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Are There Colors That Only Exist In Our Brains? Find Out More In Issue 35 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • If They Take Fluoride Out Of The Water, What Could Happen To Americans’ Teeth?
  • Paraglider Accidentally Flies Into The “Death Zone” 8,500 Meters Up – And Survives
  • World’s Oldest Fingerprint, Bioacoustics Could Give Us “A Peek Into The Language Of Wolves”, And Much More This Week
  • Please Stop Jamming Coins Into The Rocky Cracks Of Legendary Giant’s Causeway
  • We’re A Step Closer To Knowing Who Made The Earliest Known Stone Tools
  • These Little Birds Are All But Extinct – But There Is Still Time To Save Them
  • The Three Types Of Female Orgasm
  • Elon Musk Has Announced His Bombastic Plan To Get Humans To Mars
  • China Unveils World’s Largest Offshore Wind Turbine With Hub Height Of 185 Meters
  • Oldest Fingerprint, AI Decoding Wolf Language, And Injecting Life On Other Worlds?
  • “There Are Glimmers Of Hope”: Search For One Of The World’s Most Endangered Pigeons Just Scored A Big Win
  • Earth Has A 1-In-100,000 Chance Of Being Ejected From The Solar System Due To A Passing Star
  • “Necrobotics” Turns Dead Spider Corpses Into Biohybrid Robots
  • Why Even Traveling Close To The Speed Of Light Is So Hard
  • Peer Into The Universe’s Distant Past Thanks To JWST’s Longest-Exposure Photo Yet
  • First Evidence For Chubby Cheeks In Dinosaurs Challenges Our Understanding Of How They Chewed
  • The 2021 “Heat Dome” Killed Her Mother. Now, She’s Suing The Oil Companies Responsible
  • Two Of The Most Destructive Termites Got It On, Sparking Hybrid Threat In Florida
  • The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: A Story Of Anxiety And Hysteria In America’s Heartland
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version