Every household in Britain faces paying £6 a year in subsidies for the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, which began generating power from its first turbine yesterday. Hornsea One, which is being built by Orsted, the Danish energy group, 75 miles off the coast of East Yorkshire, eventually will comprise 174 turbines and is expected to generate enough electricity to power more than a million homes each year. Each turbine will be up to 190 metres tall and each blade will weigh 28 tonnes. The wind farm is expected to leave British homes and businesses facing an annual subsidy bill of £500 million, thanks to a contract awarded by the government in 2014 that was widely criticised as unduly generous, including by MPs on the public accounts committee. That is likely to add more than £6 a year to an average household’s energy bill onc e the subsidies are being paid in full from 2021, Tom Edwards, of Cornwall Insight, a consultancy, and Iain Turner, of Exane BNP Paribas, told The Times.
Times 16th Feb 2019 read more »
Electricity has been generated from what is soon to become the world’s largest offshore windfarm for the first time – after the first four massive turbines were shipped from Hull last month. Around 500 turbine blades, which each measure 75 metres in length and were made at the Siemens Gamesa factory in Hull, have been lined up on the banks of the Humber ready to be shipped out to the site of Hornsea Project One. The windfarm in the North Sea – off the coast of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire – will cover an area five-times the size of Hull and generate power for a million homes when its fully operational next year.
ITV 15th Feb 2019 read more »
Electricity has been produced for the first time at what will be the world’s biggest offshore wind farm. The first turbine at the Hornsea One development located 75 miles (120km) off the Yorkshire coast started generating power on Friday. Each of its 174 turbines will measure 623 feet (190m) high and are being made at the Siemens factory in Hull. When fully operational in 2020, it will produce enough energy for more than a million homes.
BBC 15th Feb 2019 read more »
Scotland’s felicitous climate and geography are key factors in our ability to harness and exploit a limitless bounty bequeathed to us by nature. The numbers involved are startling and mostly beyond dispute and they convey the hope that in an independent Scotland they can form a cornerstone of our future economy. In 2017 our country had a record year for creating eco-friendly energy with more than two-thirds of electricity having been produced from green schemes – an increase of 26 per cent on the year before. According to the Scottish Government this was 45 percent higher than that produced by the rest of the UK. The picture of Scotland as a renewable Xanadu was enhanced further by 34% and 9% increases in w ind generation and hydro respectively. We have thus become one of the world’s top countries for providing electricity from non-fossil fuel sources. We produce 25% of Europe’s tidal and offshore wind resource along the biggest coastline of any other country in the British Isles. Extravagantly optimistic job projections claims in this arena ought to be treated with caution. The opportunity to build a robust and sustainable economy around these figures is undeniable but Scotland has a patchy history in this area owing to questionable employment practices and recent European legislation. There are also some uncomfortable and inconvenient questions to be faced about Britain’s previous relationship with the EU and the degree to which trade union protections of workers have been stealthily eroded in this sector. According to one senior Scottish trade union official I spoke with this week – and this is a view shared by many of his colleagues in the movement – Scotland has become “a bit-part player in our own market and one that’s been dominated by state-subsidised European energy companies and Far East finance”. Many of these factors were evident in the lamentable returns Scottish workers gained from the manufacturing work on the Beatrice Offshore windfarm on the Moray Firth. Scotland received around 3% of the manufacturing work for this project which was worth £2.6Bn, encompassed 100 wind turbines and is expected to generate enough electricity to power 900,000 homes. Even so, Burntisland Fabrication were supplying only a third of wind turbine jackets and were forced to sack hundreds of workers before receiving a £15m Scottish Government bail-out after it encountered difficulties with one sub-contractor.
Herald 16th Feb 2019 read more »
