wind farm essay

The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede ( c 1668-1670) by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael. Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Learning to love monsters

Windmills were once just machines on the land but now seem delightfully bucolic. could wind turbines win us over too.

by Stephen Case   + BIO

Today’s modern wind turbines seem to repel poetic or artistic engagement. It is difficult to imagine a landscape painter portraying their spare lines and uniform rows as icons of a pastoral idyll, as the windmills of the past often were.

Perceptions of modern wind turbines seem worlds away, for example, from how Robert Louis Stevenson described the windmills of England in 1882:

There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country, their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day, with uncouth gesticulations, their air gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.

The aspects that struck Stevenson – the motion of windmills, symbols of prosperity, on the horizon – were highlighted a decade before by the French novelist Alphonse Daudet in his depiction of Provençal life:

The hills all about the village were dotted with windmills. Whichever way you looked, you could see sails turning in the mistral above the pines, and long strings of little donkeys laden with sacks going up and down the paths; and all week long it was a joy to hear on these hill-tops the cracking of whips, the creaking of the canvas of the sails, and the shouts of the millers’ men … These windmills, you see, were not only the wealth of our land, they were its pride and joy.

Yet perceptions of windmills have not been uniformly idyllic. Since they first appeared on the landscape of medieval Europe, windmills represented an imposition of the technological on the pastoral. They were, in the phrase of the wind energy author Paul Gipe, ‘machines in the garden’, straddling the boundary of the agrarian and mechanical. Unlike the static technologies shaping landscapes – from cathedral towers or canals in the past, to power lines, solar panels or rows of genetically modified crops today – windmills are constantly in motion. They refuse to passively disappear into the landscape.

With the spread of modern windfarms, the cultural positioning of wind power remains a contentious issue. But the debate is not new: for centuries, the symbolic nature of windmills – as technological monsters or icons of the idyllic – has been open to question. Understanding this debate can help open new avenues for engagement with today’s wind technology.

T hough European windmills first appeared as early as the 11th or 12th centuries, there are still clues to how this new technology was initially perceived. In Dante’s Inferno , for instance, when the poet reaches the deepest circle of hell, Satan becomes visible through the gloom. As the ominous figure appears, he is described with a metaphor that would have been growing familiar to many of Dante’s original 14th-century readers:

As, when thick fog upon the landscape lies, or when the night darkens our hemisphere, a turning windmill seems afar to rise …

Through the darkness, the devil’s huge limbs are visible like the sails of a windmill pinwheeling on the horizon. To readers whose largest built realities were stable, unmoving church towers or city walls, the ceaseless, arching sweep of a windmill’s arms was no doubt disconcerting to say the least. Later, when Cervantes pictured them as giants in Don Quixote’s imagination, he could gesture to this lingering unease over this most prominent structure on the medieval horizon.

Windmills became integral to communities: structures with names, histories and inhabitants

Besides their visual impression, the first windmills also challenged existing energy infrastructure. Since Roman times, power to mill grain had been confined to water mills and remained the property and protected prerogative of feudal landowners. As the first windmills spread throughout England, they were greeted with resistance by landowners attempting to preserve their ancient rights. Windmills ‘threatened both lucrative old water mill franchises and traditional upper-class privileges,’ recounts the historian Edward Kealey in Harvesting the Air (1987), and ‘offered quick-witted peasants an opportunity to evade manorial regulations, act independently, and become quite prosperous.’ Angry landowners ordered illegal windmills be torn down.

A Windmill near Brighton (1824) by John Constable. Courtesy the V&A Museum, London

Yet eventually this disrupting, disquieting technology became an aspect of the pastoral ideal. Windmills became integral to communities: structures with names, histories and inhabitants. Operating a windmill took skill, care and attention. The miller, who lived in the windmill, was fully occupied with watching the weather, trimming the sails, and keeping the windmill functional from generation to generation – besides providing a vital agricultural role in the community by grinding grain. Ultimately, as the art historian Alison McNeil Kettering has argued , windmills took on the role of ‘cultural signifier’, representing provision and guardianship over a well-run community, becoming familiar icons of ‘pastoral tranquility’ and ‘agrarian idyll’.

As the last generation of millers cared for the last windmills turning in England, their aesthetic value lingered even as their commercial value disappeared. As Stanley Freese wrote in Windmills and Millwrighting (1957):

[N]either photograph nor drawing can capture for my pages the most beautiful of all country scenes; only those who have caught sight of the big white sails of a windmill following one another against a background of dark hills or woodlands, or black canvas sails soaring one after another into an evening sky, can fully apprehend the characteristic beauty of this structure, which differs from all others because it is alive with comely motion, never awkward or ungainly, but blending well with every kind of landscape.

A s steam replaced wind in Europe, a new type of windmill emerged across the Atlantic. Whereas European windmills were inhabited structures positioned within the community, the unsettled expanse of the western United States saw the windmill altered to run for decades in isolation, pumping water for farmsteads or for cattle stations scattered across hundreds of miles of arid ranchland. Dozens of models represented a Darwinian response to this environmental challenge: self-lubricating mechanisms, designed to track and spill the wind with counterweights and springs, their complex down-gearing transforming rotary motion into a steady back-and-forth pumping action in even the lightest breeze. By 1889, there were more than 70 windmill factories in cities across the American Midwest. At the European windmill’s peak, there were perhaps 100,000 of the structures across Europe; by contrast, there would eventually be more than 6 million windmills in the US.

Lame Deer, Montana, September 1941. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress

Unlike the graceful European windmill, the new US variety was considered ugly and ungainly. An American architect insisted that American windmills ‘should be condemned’ as offensive to sight: ‘To see these awkward, spider-like structures dancing fandangos before our eyes disturbs the repose and mars the landscape of our otherwise beautiful homes.’ Worse, another author said the countryside was littered with wrecked windmills, casualties of the failure to maintain or lubricate – this last chore a near-weekly requirement for some of the earliest models. Yet despite these initial impressions, the new American windmill (technically, a wind pump) soon became an icon of the Western settlers themselves: independent, self-reliant, steadily facing whatever storms arose.

Manufacturers helped cultivate this view of windmills as totems of the American west

A Kansas City Star reporter writing in 1964 captured the feeling of growing up in the shadow of a farmhouse windmill, an experience common to generations of settlers and their descendants. There was :

the gentle sough of the breeze through the fan, the creak of the tower and the rhythmic metallic working of the gears and sucker rod, and finally the steady soft pouring of water into the tank … And then there was a sound all its own: a blade bent by some long forgotten encounter with the wooden tower at each revolution – thump, thump, thump, when the wind was soft and at a machine-gun rattle when a summer storm sent up dust and dead tumble weeds racing across the flat … On quiet nights, for a child awakening in the darkness of a stuffy room, the chipping of the wounded blade against the tower took on a comforting sound, reassuring that this was home, that there was no storm, and that the windmill was pumping water.

Like the European windmill before it, the American windmill was becoming a cultural signifier of a new pastoral ideal.

Courtesy the Library of Congress

In the new commercial context, windmill manufacturers helped cultivate this view of windmills as totems of the American west, presenting them in advertisements and catalogues as part of an idyllic farm landscape. Competition among manufacturers also meant windmill designs became as simple and reliant as possible. Windmills needed to be shipped across the country, assembled hundreds of miles away on the open prairie, and to operate in isolation for years on end. Their buyers needed to own, understand, and service the windmills themselves. The success of this approach is evidenced by the windmills still spinning across the US and the world, with a handful of companies today producing designs that remain unchanged from the 1910s. Like the European windmill, American windmills became pastoral icons, their ceaseless labour – working in the slightest breeze and weathering the harshest storm – a visual metaphor for diligence, independence and patient endeavour.

T oday’s massive wind turbines are larger than past windmills by an order of magnitude. The question facing this latest generation of wind technology is more than whether they will be seen as icons of energy independence and sustainability, or simply another extractive industry ‘replicating the exploitative practices of the infrastructures they would replace,’ as the historian of science Nathan Kapoor put it . Rather, the question is whether the social imaginaries available to previous generations of windmills – the chance to become symbols of provision, community or self-reliance – are available to modern windfarms. It is a question playing out, for instance, in debates between farmers who welcome wind turbines and the income they represent and those – often within the turbines’ shadow – who see them as monstrous technological impositions on the landscape.

What prevents modern wind turbines from the sort of cultural integration that European and American windmills obtained? Part of the answer comes by considering wind technologies in light of work by the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann. In his classic Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984), Borgmann offers his analysis of ‘device’ as both critique and exemplar of modern technology. According to Jesse S Tatum, a device is a technological artefact designed to make ‘a single commodity highly available while making the mechanism of its procurement recede from view’. Our current technological paradigm is the creation of as many devices as possible, from cars to electronics to infrastructure, to make commodities hyper-convenient and abundant.

The problem with devices is that, by design, they are black boxes. Devices, in Borgmann’s treatment, are inaccessible to understanding or engagement. They demand no skill, disburdening their users while, in Borgmann’s words, resisting ‘appropriation through care, repair, the exercise of skill, and bodily engagement’. Devices, whether kitchen appliances or the electrical systems that supply their energy, neither express their creator nor ‘reveal a region and its particular orientation within nature and culture.’ Writing in 1984, long before the advent of smartphones, Borgmann’s analysis is prescient in highlighting how technological devices provide essential commodities such as information, entertainment, energy and food, while simultaneously keeping the means of their production inaccessible and largely invisible.

Impossible to consume the commodity of ground grain from a windmill without ‘invoking or enacting a context’

Despite the abundance of commodities, our interaction with devices leaves us distracted and dissatisfied as our engagement with the world is reduced to ‘narrow points of contact in labour and consumption’. For Borgmann, the solution is not a return to a pretechnological setting but rather to recentre human practices and flourishing around what he refers to as ‘focal things’. In contrast to a device, a focal thing is ‘inseparable from its context, namely, its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely, engagement’. Focal things represent locality and craft; they engage body and mind, and that engagement requires skill: ‘The experience of a thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.’

Focal things invite users to interact with them, giving rise to what Borgmann calls ‘focal practices’ that make the thing part of the broader culture and social structure of the community. The European windmill, dependent in its operation on the skill and care of the miller, in its construction and maintenance on the knowledge and expertise of carpenters and millwrights, and in its purpose on local agricultural practices, was a quintessential Borgmannian focal thing – a nexus of material culture, social heritage and artistic expression. It was impossible to simply consume the commodity of ground grain from a windmill without ‘invoking or enacting a context’.

Likewise, American windmills, though factory manufactured on a large scale, immediately entered the context of homestead or ranch. They were designed to be open and accessible to users for care and maintenance, and the farmer or rancher took ownership and exercised skill in that maintenance and care – learning the idiosyncrasies of each individual windmill. While providing the essential commodity of water, windmills took on additional symbolic and cultural roles, offering a sense of solace, wellbeing and aesthetic pleasure (as evidenced by their reappearance on smaller scales as lawn ornaments across the Midwest and beyond). Both European and American windmills, according to Borgmann’s paradigm, functioned as focal things – technological artefacts that connected their users and communities to both landscape and wind.

M odern wind turbines are designed to fit the device paradigm, providing the commodity of energy or (to the landowner who rents space for their footprint) money, but they fail in a vital respect. No matter how they are isolated from nearby communities or coastlines, their motion keeps them visible on the horizon, even as the other large-scale energy infrastructure devices (electric lines, telescope poles, cellphone towers) fade from view. Their primary mechanism of transforming wind into energy remains impossible to hide. As the growth of sustainable energy continues, more and larger windfarms will be required, and their visible impact will only increase. The tension between wind turbines as disengaging devices and their obvious presence on the landscape will continue. Previous iterations of windmills, however, were not ultimately accepted by making them invisible but rather by changing how they were perceived. Can something similar happen for modern wind turbines, transforming them from devices to something that’s closer to Borgmann’s focal things, and opening a path to richer cultural and aesthetic engagement?

Wind turbines are currently designed and implemented as devices. At least in part for safety and liability concerns, they are isolated even as they remain in view. Wind turbines are, like Borgmann described high-rise buildings, ‘though imposing … not accessible either to one’s understanding or to one’s engagement.’ But this disengagement is one of the main reasons wind turbines are often viewed with such negativity. As the philosopher Gordon G Brittan Jr expresses it, wind turbines ‘are ubiquitously and anonymously the same, alien objects impressed on a region but in no deep way connected to it. They have nothing to say to us, nothing to express; they conceal rather than reveal.’

On the other hand, these modern windmills have many characteristics of Borgmann’s focal things. Focal things, according to Borgmann, ‘are concrete, tangible, and deep … They engage us in the fullness of our capacities. And they thrive in a technological setting.’ By depth, Borgmann means that all of an object’s physical features are significant, something acutely true of precision-designed wind turbines constructed so that each curve and angle generates as little resistance and as much efficiency as possible. Depth means complexity, and complexity can be an aspect of engagement. Yet much of the complex, elegant design of wind turbines that could make them engaging rather than alien remains physically hidden and corporately protected.

An unused turbine blade propped along a country road allows one to experience its scale and scope

Engagement with focal things need not be physical. Besides the handful of skilled workers who design, construct and maintain the turbines (and whose work itself is a point of possible wider engagement, as shown by the reality TV show Turbine Cowboys ), most people will not be able to physically engage with these artefacts in any practical way. But education and outreach are powerful forms of engagement largely unutilised by the various actors involved in the creation and maintenance of windfarms. This makes sense within the device paradigm: we aren’t usually invited into engagement with our electrical substations. But if it is impossible to ignore them, education and engagement can help us move toward making wind turbines focal things.

Other avenues of engagement could be as simple as suggested routes navigating drivers or cyclists on public roads through wind farms, allowing visitors to intentionally experience them as part of an aesthetic vista. And though no one should be climbing them, there are ways to bring their physicality nearer the observer. Near my own home, for instance, an unused turbine blade propped lengthwise along a country road allows one to experience a sense of the scale and scope of these artefacts. The experience of locality could be integrated with education: information such as how fast the turbines spin or how much energy they generate from moment to moment need not be obscured or accessible only to experts. These physicalities could instead be ways to engage those passing through. This doesn’t mean expensive interpretive centres at each wind farm (though it could); it might be as simple as signage along the roadway. Science communicators can help here to form bridges between the artefacts and the curious public who watches them along the horizon.

Though a more complicated concern, ownership needs to be considered as well. A deep sense of engagement comes about from artefacts that are individually or communally owned. It was this sense of ownership that allowed US windmills their cultural role and that made European windmills a vital part of their communities. This continues today, as individuals and local communities lovingly restore and maintain these earlier windmill iterations, though they are no longer the means of providing the commodities they once did. The current model of off-site ownership of wind turbines is a powerful factor keeping today’s windmills firmly within the device paradigm.

For Borgmann, ‘the dignity and greatness of a thing in its own right’ – and the stately turning turbines along my Midwestern horizons can certainly have this dignity – is what allows focal things and the practices built around them to ‘gather and illuminate the tangible world and our appropriation of it’.

Borgmann’s device paradigm helps make sense of cultural and aesthetic concerns around modern wind farms, and the history of windmills gives hints of how things might be different. Without efforts of engagement, wind turbines remain inscrutable devices, easy to reduce to uniform, monolithic symbols of extractive capitalism. Unless we try to integrate them into local culture as focal things, they will never be symbols of the landscape like windmills of the past.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Wind Energy — Essay On Wind Energy

Essay on Wind Energy

• Categories: Climate Change Renewable Energy Wind Energy

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Words: 1582 |

Published: Mar 19, 2024

Words: 1582 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

Table of contents

I. introduction, a. definition and importance of wind energy, b. thesis statement, ii. history and development of wind energy, a. origins of wind energy usage, b. technological advancements in wind turbines, c. global adoption and growth of wind energy, iii. environmental benefits of wind energy, a. reduced greenhouse gas emissions, b. conservation of natural resources, c. impact on biodiversity, iv. economic benefits of wind energy, a. job creation in the wind energy sector, b. cost-effectiveness compared to fossil fuels, c. economic growth in regions with wind farms, v. challenges and limitations of wind energy, a. intermittency and variability of wind, b. land use and visual impact, c. impact on wildlife, vi. future prospects of wind energy, a. research and development in wind energy technology, b. integration of wind energy with other renewable sources, c. policy and government support for wind energy, vii. case studies of successful wind energy projects, a. offshore wind farms in europe, b. wind energy in developing countries, c. community-owned wind energy projects, viii. conclusion.

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What Is the Future of Wind Energy?

Humans have used windmills to capture the force of the wind as mechanical energy for more than 1,300 years . Unlike early windmills, however, modern wind turbines use generators and other components to convert energy from the spinning blades into a smooth flow of AC electricity.

In the video below, Resnick Sustainability Institute researcher John Dabiri discusses the future of wind energy technology.

How much of global electricity demand is met by wind energy?

Wind energy is a small but fast-growing fraction of electricity production. It accounts for 5 percent of global electricity production and 8 percent of the U.S. electricity supply.

Globally, wind energy capacity surpasses 743 gigawatts , which is more than is available from grid-connected solar energy and about half as much as hydropower can provide. Nearly three-quarters of that 651 gigawatts comes from wind farms in five countries: China, the U.S., Germany, India, and Spain. Wind energy capacity in the Americas has tripled over the past decade.

In the U.S., wind is now a dominant renewable energy source , with enough wind turbines to generate more than 100 million watts, or megawatts, of electricity, equivalent to the consumption of about 29 million average homes.

The cost of wind energy has plummeted over the past decade. In the U.S., it is cost-competitive with natural gas and solar power.

Wind energy and solar energy complement each other, because wind is often strongest after the sun has heated the ground for a time. Warm air rises from the most heated areas, leaving a void where other air can rush in, which produces horizontal wind currents . We can draw on solar energy during the earlier parts of the day and turn to wind energy in the evening and night. Wind energy has added value in areas that are too cloudy or dark for strong solar energy production, especially at higher latitudes.

How big are wind turbines and how much electricity can they generate?

Typical utility-scale land-based wind turbines are about 250 feet tall and have an average capacity of 2.55 megawatts, each producing enough electricity for hundreds of homes. While land-based wind farms may be remote, most are easy to access and connect to existing power grids.

Smaller turbines, often used in distributed systems that generate power for local use rather than for sale, average about 100 feet tall and produce between 5 and 100 kilowatts.

One type of offshore wind turbine currently in development stands 853 feet tall, four-fifths the height of the Eiffel Tower, and can produce 13 megawatts of power. Adjusted for variations in wind, that is enough to consistently power thousands of homes. While tall offshore turbines lack some of the advantages of land-based wind farms, use of them is burgeoning because they can capture the energy of powerful, reliable winds high in the air near coastlines, where most of the largest cities in the world are located.

What are some potential future wind technologies other than turbines?

Engineers are in the early stages of creating airborne wind turbines , in which the components are either floated by a gas like helium or use their own aerodynamics to stay high in the air, where wind is stronger. These systems are being considered for offshore use, where it is expensive and difficult to install conventional wind turbines on tall towers.

Trees, which can withstand gale forces and yet move in response to breezes from any direction, also are inspiring new ideas for wind energy technology. Engineers speculate about making artificial wind-harvesting trees . That would require new materials and devices that could convert energy from a tree's complex movements into the steady rotation that traditional generators need. The prize is wind energy harvested closer to the ground with smaller, less obtrusive technologies and in places with complex airflows, such as cities.

What are the challenges of using wind energy?

Extreme winds challenge turbine designers. Engineers have to create systems that will start generating energy at relatively low wind speeds and also can survive extremely strong winds. A strong gale contains 1,000 times more power than a light breeze, and engineers don't yet know how to design electrical generators or turbine blades that can efficiently capture such a broad range of input wind power. To be safe, turbines may be overbuilt to withstand winds they will not experience at many sites, driving up costs and material use. One potential solution is the use of long-term weather forecasting and AI to better predict the wind resources at individual locations and inform designs for turbines that suit those sites.

Climate change will bring more incidents of unusual weather, including potential changes in wind patterns . Wind farms may help mitigate some of the harmful effects of climate change. For example, turbines in cold regions are routinely winterized to keep working in icy weather when other systems may fail, and studies have demonstrated that offshore wind farms may reduce the damage caused by hurricanes . A more challenging situation will arise if wind patterns shift significantly. The financing for wind energy projects depends critically on the ability to predict wind resources at specific sites decades into the future. One potential way to mitigate unexpected, climate-change-related losses or gains of wind is to flexibly add and remove groups of smaller turbines, such as vertical-axis wind turbines , within existing large-scale wind farms.

Wind farms do have environmental impacts . The most well-known is harm to wildlife, including birds and bats . Studies are informing wind farm siting and management practices that minimize harm to wildlife , and Audubon, a bird conservation group, now supports well-planned wind farms. The construction and maintenance of wind farms involves energy-intensive activities such as trucking, road-building, concrete production, and steel construction. Also, while towers can be recycled, turbine blades are not easily recyclable. In hopes of developing low-to-zero-waste wind farms, scientists aim to design new reuse and disposal strategies , and recyclable plastic turbine blades. Studies show that wind energy's carbon footprint is quickly offset by the electricity it generates and is among the lowest of any energy source .

Dive Deeper

Explainer: What is offshore wind and what does its future look like?

An offshore wind farm with multiple wind turbines in the sea. Image:  Unsplash/Nicholas Doherty

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Listen to the article

• Offshore wind farms are hitting the headlines for their size and for gaining government backing across the globe.
• Boosting offshore wind power is seen as a way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and speed the journey to net zero, and it can also create jobs and economic growth.
• There are still challenges to overcome to scale the technology, especially for floating offshore wind, which is not yet industrialized.

Picture a plate of cupcakes. Look tempting don’t they? But each one took energy to bake - energy that could in future be generated by offshore wind farms.

In fact, just one rotation of a GE Haliade-X 12 MW offshore wind turbine generates enough power to bake 28 plates full of cupcakes or, perhaps more usefully, power the average UK home for 24 hours .

Offshore wind farms are hitting the headlines across the globe for their sheer scale - and as countries increasingly turn to them to decrease their dependency on energy from Russia as well as speed up their energy transition.

Global capacity of large-scale wind farms is expected to increase 10-fold , from 34 GW in 2020 to 330 GW in 2030, and spread throughout 24 countries (up from nine today), according to a report by consultancy Wood McKenzie. It estimated $1 trillion would flow into the offshore wind industry over the next decade.

Winds of change around the globe

Kincardine, off the coast of Scotland, is currently the world’s largest floating wind farm , with five giant V164-9.525 MW turbines made by Danish company Vestas .

In August, eight EU countries on the Baltic Sea pledged to increase offshore wind power generation capacity sevenfold by 2030, up from 2.8 GW currently, most of which is in Danish and German waters .

Putting further wind in the sails of the renewables sector, the Biden administration in the US unveiled its Floating Offshore Wind Shot in September. It aims to “reduce the costs of floating technologies by more than 70% by 2035, to $45 per megawatt-hour” and increase capacity to 15 GW by 2035, enough to power 5 million homes.

This is in addition to the 30 GW by 2030 of offshore wind power target, which will be mainly met through ‘fixed-bottom’ technology.

The Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024 report showed that after a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatilities.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Energy and Materials is driving the transition to a “fit for 2050” energy system. It is a cross-industry platform building new coalitions and delivering insights required for a sustainable, secure and just energy future.

Learn more about our impact:

• Clean energy in emerging economies: We are advancing country-specific renewable energy finance solutions for four of the biggest emerging and developing economies : India, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia. In the latter, a new solar and battery initiative is bringing 15MW of clean energy to the East Sumba region – enough to power 4,000 homes and avoid 5.5KtCO₂ yearly emissions.
• Energy Transition Index: We have measured the progress of 120 countries on the performance of their energy systems, enabling policymakers and businesses to identify the necessary actions for the energy transition.
• Mining and metals blockchain : We released a proof of concept to trace emissions across the value chain using blockchain technology, helping accelerate global action for country-specific financing solutions.
• Clean power and electrification: We are accelerating the adoption of clean power and electric solutions in the next decade to help increase clean energy consumption threefold by 2030.

Want to know more about our centre’s impact or get involved? Contact us .

The southern Chinese city of Chaozhou is planning a wind farm that would dwarf all of Norway’s power plants combined , according to Bloomberg. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects China to have the largest installed offshore wind capacity by the end of 2022 - more than the UK and EU combined.

Boosting offshore wind power is seen as a way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and speed the journey to net zero. But it’s also providing jobs and economic growth to coastal towns and revitalizing industries, with the Global Wind Energy Council in 2021 predicting both onshore and offshore wind would create 3.3 million jobs over the next five years across the entire value chain.

But what exactly are offshore wind farms and what does the future hold?

Offshore wind farms: floating vs fixed bottom

Kincardine might be the world’s largest floating windfarm, but Hornsea 2 , off the coast of Yorkshire in the UK, is the world’s largest fixed-bottom offshore wind farm and became fully operational in September.

Run by Danish energy company Ørsted, which pioneered the first offshore wind farms 30 years ago, Hornsea 2’s 165 wind turbines are sited next to its older sibling Hornsea 1 - and together they can power 2.5 million homes, contributing to the UK government’s goal of 50 GW in offshore wind capacity by 2030.

In July, Ørsted were awarded the contract for Hornsea 3, which will power 3.2 million homes, while Hornsea 4 is going through the planning process and a decision is expected in early 2023.

It’s hard to imagine how colossal these feats of engineering are. The giant blades on Vestas’ V164 turbines are each 80 metres long, for example, and when they’re installed on towers, the tip of the blade can reach more than 200m above sea level - that’s more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

Then there are the 390km of subsea export cables that take the power generated from Hornsea 2 to the shore at Horseshoe Point in Lincolnshire.

So what’s the difference between floating and fixed-bottom wind farms?

It comes down to location. Floating wind turbines don’t need to be grounded in the seabed, like fixed-bottom ones, so they can be sited further out to sea in water deeper than 60m, where winds are stronger. They are then anchored to the seabed with multiple mooring lines , borrowing technology from floating oil platforms, according to the Norwegian state-owned energy firm Equinor.

Is the future floating?

If onshore wind was the first generation in wind-farm technology, which informed offshore fixed-bottom wind farms, floating wind farms are effectively the third generation.

“Floating offshore wind will be able to build on the developments made in seabed fixed offshore wind to reach scale even faster – much as today’s offshore wind industry was built on achievements onshore,” says Gabriel Davies, Ørsted’s Programme Director, Floating Wind .

As of October 2022, only around 50 floating offshore wind turbines have been commissioned, says Davies. But global stock is expected to exceed 5 GW by 2030 and 25 GW by 2035.

While fixed-bottom wind farms cost less to install, the real potential for power generation is floating on the horizon. The IEA found, in 2019 the potential for offshore wind power globally could be 18 times the current global power demand - with the majority where waters are deeper than 60m and better suited to floating turbines.

To scale, companies are working together to create a global offshore wind ecosystem - for example, UK company Principle Power created the floating structure for Kincardine , and the turbines themselves were made by Danish firm Vestas.

To ensure the turbines can withstand North Sea storms, a mechanism of pumps shifts liquid ballast between the floating yellow cylinders which balances the platform and puts the turbine at the best angle, Principle Power’s Greg Campbell-Smith told the BBC.

What are the challenges in building offshore wind farms?

Investment and government backing is crucial to ensure capacity grows in a sustainable way. But with growing competition for projects that take years to complete, require local ‘content’ when the local industry may still be in its infancy, as well as access to deep sea ports, wind turbine installation vessels and other essential infrastructure , uncertainty can creep in.

“With all the political ambition going into this space, in the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea, in the US, building up capacity in the industry to actually deliver in a cost-effective way is very important,” says Nils Askær-Hune, Ørsted’s Lead Public Affairs Advisor on Socio-Economics, Global Public Affairs.

“We have to have a long horizon for planning. In order to ensure efficient resource utilization, it is essential that the expansion takes place sequentially and is planned in accordance with the expansion of capacity in the industry.”

The current auction process is precarious, with some governments using ‘zero bid’ auctions and toying with the concept of ‘negative bidding’ , which would see wind companies paying them for the right to develop, according to Wind Europe.

Added to the rise in transport and materials costs due to COVID-19 and compounded by the energy crisis and war in Ukraine, it’s becoming harder to build viable projects with sustainable supply chains.

Decarbonizing the wind-farm value chain is also a major challenge, as the turbines themselves are made from steel and other metals which require energy-intensive processes to manufacture.

Askær-Hune says: “We can build offshore wind farms which will help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions as they produce green energy and enable the production of green hydrogen that enables the decarbonization of hard-to-abate sectors. However, in order to create a world that runs entirely on green energy, as a company we must decarbonize our full value chain. At Ørsted we work every day to achieve net-zero emissions in our full value chain (scope 1-3) by 2040.”

Another challenge is around the impact of an offshore wind farm on marine biodiversity. Ørsted aims to have a net-positive impact on biodiversity by design , such as turning the foundations of fixed-bottom turbines into artificial reefs - habitats and shelter for species like mussels, Atlantic cod and even coral.

For example, the company has just launched a global partnership with WWF to advance offshore wind deployment that enhances ocean biodiversity.

Floating wind turbines can be installed with less noise and disruption to marine mammals and beyond the foraging ranges of breeding birds, says Ørsted. But the anchors and mooring lines will need monitoring for their impacts on life on the seafloor.

What governments can do to support offshore wind farms

The ambition and will for wind is there, but bureaucracy around permits is slowing down the process.

At COP27, nine new countries joined the Global Offshore Wind Alliance initiated by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Denmark and the Global Wind Energy Council, which wants to "lift the barriers" to developing offshore wind.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has proposed temporary new emergency regulation designed to speed up the REPowerEU Plan to develop renewables to accelerate the energy transition and end the EU’s dependence on Russian gas.

Specifically, this would help to fast-track lengthy and complicated administrative and permitting procedures stopping the development of renewables projects.

As Vestas notes in this Economist article: “The climate and energy crises are hugely complex, but the solutions are available. By accelerating the permitting process governments will not only ensure their energy security and reduce emissions, but also unlock swathes of economic potential. The time to act is now.”

Both Ørsted and Vestas are members of the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition of companies creating a market for the emerging technologies that are crucial in order to reach Net Zero by 2050.

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