Renewable Energy
Research conducted by the British Wind Energy Association estimates that Britain has the largest offshore wind resource in the world, and 33% of all the wind resources in the European Union. Due to the unusual construction of the seas around us Britain benefits from enormous areas of relatively shallow seas, perfect for the creation of offshore wind farms.
To make the most of that the government recently unveiled nine new offshore wind farms which will create the biggest infrastructure project for renewable wind energy in the world. Construction is due to start on the nine sites in 2014, with the rather ambitious aim of being completed by 2020.
The scale of these plans is quite incredible. By 2020, providing everything goes to plan, these offshore wind farms may be able to provide one third of all the energy required by the United Kingdom. Europe’s energy firms are on board with the idea, with Centrica, the company who own Britain's largest boiler installer, British Gas, just one of the companies on board, with the contract for the third largest of the new zones.
Critics of the plans have said that wind energy is too expensive and too unreliable to justify this scale of investment. A coal fired power station costs around £1m to build, with a nuclear power station and a wind farm costing around £3m. However, a nuclear power station is able to produce energy all the time, whereas wind farms are, of course, reliant on the wind, meaning that the cost of each unit of electricity from a wind farm is higher.
However, it is important to remember that wind is, of course, free, renewable and clean. There are none of the costs associated to buying the fuel to power a coal power station, nor to deal with the waste created in the nuclear process. Even for relatively high costs at the moment, less reliance on foreign sources of energy, as well as the great reduction in carbon dioxide emissions make the wind farm project well worth it.
The main problems at the moment are technical. With these farms being built as much as 220km from Britain's coast, they have to operate in much deeper waters than any of Britain's other wind turbines. Then there is the problem of increasing the rate of manufacturing to meet the targets proposed in the scheme. These challenges, however, are worth overcoming for the prize of making Britain one of the greenest economies in the world by the end of the next decade.