British wind power is building up a storm of new projects. The British government today announced that it supports building the world’s biggest offshore wind farm. The London Array will produce 1 gigawatt. E.ON, Dong and Masdar are the companies that are responsible for the first phase of the project.
The new offshore wind farm will be situated off Kent and Essex and start feeding electricity into the grid in 2012, hopefully generating enough electricity to power a quarter of Greater London's homes.
"The London Array is a flagship project in our drive to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and meet future energy needs,” said Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement.
The London Array should also be seen in the light of other wind power investments in the U.K., a country that looks upon itself as the “world leader in offshore wind farms, creating jobs and prosperity for the economy,” according to Gordon Brown.
Other examples of British investments are a number of wind power projects in Scotland involving company SeaEnergy Renewables, which mounts wind turbines on four-legged platforms developed by Burntisland, each turbine has a capacity of 5.5 megawatts.
The Burntisland technology originally comes from offshore oil drilling platforms (see the video footage and interview with CEO Joel Staadecker here).
Earlier this year The Crown Estate (the body in the United Kingdom that dispenses the land rights in the country) awarded 10 leases to companies developing offshore wind farms. And Scotland also hopes to get half of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.
SeaEnergy Renewables is a part of a group that won the rights to develop a 920-megawatt turbine off Inch Cape and is also in a group that won the right to build a 905 megawatt farm in the Beatrice field.