The latest giant offshore wind farm off the UK coast has delivered its first power to the grid this week, as a raft of fresh announcements from across the industry served to highlight the sector’s growing maturity. E.ON announced this week the first power from the Rampion wind farm off the Sussex coast has been successfully generated, after the first of 116 turbines was brought online. Turbine installation at the 400MW project began in March this year and was completed ahead of schedule in just over six months in September. The milestone comes just days after the 402MW Dudgeon offshore wind farm off the coast of Norfolk was officially opened, with operator Statoil and its partners Masdar and Statkraft had reduced construction costs by 15 per cent against the original £1.5bn budget. It also came as Swedish renewables developer Vattenfall placed an ‘historically large’ order that will see Siemens Gamesa provide turbines to three new Danish offshore wind farms. The company said the three wind farms – Kriegers Flak in the Baltic Sea and Vesterhav Syd and Nord in the North Sea – will require €1.7bn of investment and are set to deliver 1GW of capacity. The tenders for Kriegers Flak and Vesterhav Syd and Nord were won in 2016 at a world record low price of 0.050 EUR/kWh and 0.061 EUR/kWh, respectively.
Business Green 29th Nov 2017 read more »
