Britain has major plans to greatly increase their wind energy production?
Here are some of the highlights of the plans:
-Construction to begin in 2014
-A projected 6000 turbines to be installed
-The project could support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020
-Licenses come from the Crown Estate which owns the British seabeds(see pic below) and were awarded to about 10 power company ventures and partnerships
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-“The biggest award, for the Dogger Bank area…went to a consortium consisting of RWE npower of Britain, Scottish and Southern Energy of Britain and the Norwegian energy groups, Statkraft and Statoil”
-“Turbines in the nine zones could generate up to 32 gigawatts of power, a quarter of the UK’s electricity needs…..(currently)only 1 percent of the world’s 150 gigawatts of wind capacity is offshore….and only 2 percent of British power comes from wind”
-Building these farms in deep water and often heavy seas will not be easy at all and has been compared to the engineering difficulty of building the English Channel tunnel.
-“The plan is intended to help Britain reduce carbon emissions and achieve its pledge of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.”
We admire this daring commitment to a Green energy initiative. The very important part of wind energy that is never mentioned is that the turbines will be made in Europe, the labor to install will come from Britain, the engineering to install will come from multiple countries and the wind itself will come from the sea. There is absolutely NO requirement to have a standing army go to a remote area and lose lives to protect the development of these energies. What is the positive externality of this realization. Certainly almost equal to the power generation itself.
Material for this blog came largely from the NY Times and from the BBC
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