Offshore Wind Farms are the fastest growing segments in the Wind Energy Industry area boosted by improvements in Wind Technology and subsidies by the government.Offshore Wind Energy is growing the fasted in the United Kingdom which is surprising considering the poor state of Green Energy there.Europeans are leading the way in offshore wind energy given their massive strengths in Wind Technology.However other major Wind Turbine Companies are also developing their capabilities by spending millions of dollars on offshore wind turbine R&D.Offshore Wind Farms have also come in for criticism because of their higher costs and the longer time to install them.Note offshore wind projects offer even more Wind Energy Advantages than normal Land Based Wind Farms.The only problem facing offshore wind power is high costs as the industry still is on the learning curve with only 1.5% of the world’s total installed wind capacity coming from offshore wind farms.
List of Offshore Wind Farm Projects
First Wind Farm in the World was built at Vindeby in Denmark in 1991 with a capacity of around 5 MW
United Kingdom has the the largest offshore wind capacity in the world at around 1300 MW and is also home to the biggest offshore wind farm at Thanet.
Denmark
Denmark which is the home base of the largest Wind Turbine Manufacturer in the world Vestas and also draws the largest amount of electricity from Wind Power also holds the distinction of building the first offshore wind farm in 1991.The country has the second largest offshore wind capacity at 850 MW.The main offshore wind farms in Denmark are
Europe (except UK and Denmark)
Northern Europe has most of the offshore wind farms in the world with 39 Offshore Wind Projects constructed with around 2.4 GW of capacity which makes up 80% of the world’s total offshore wind capacity.Note tremendous growth has been planned with 100 GW of offshore wind farms to be installed by 2020 with Europe having a 40% global capacity target.Note Vestas and Siemens are the leading provider of offshore wind turbines accounting for majority of the shipments till date.Vestas has further strengthened its leadership by introducing a 5 MW offshore wind turbine.Most of the wind turbines installed have been 3 MW turbines.
European Countries
China
Asia has only one offshore wind farm built till date at 102-megawatt Donghai Bridge Wind Farm located 5 to 8 miles off the coast of the East China Sea in China.Note China plans to build a number of offshore wind farms and the Chinese Wind Turbines companies are already devloping large 5 MW or higher capacity turbines targeting this market.
Future Offshore Wind Projects
Most of the big Offshore Wind Projects are being built in Europe in the leading offshore wind country UK with Germany following close behind.
UK
Italy
Germany
USA
Cape Wind Project Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts
Summary
The biggest offshore wind farm is just 300 MW in capacity while some of the offshore wind farms being planned have a capacity as great as 9000 MW which will challenge the biggest power plants in the world in terms of size and scale.Offshore wind energy represents a great opportunity for the industry as the investments involved will be quite large and the potential huge.This is the reason that even non-wind companies like Northrop Grumman,Daewoo are also entering the Offshore Wind Energy Industry as they are closely related to their shipbuilding industry.
source – Wikipedia for the Wind Farms