The HuffPo has a post on North America's first offshore wind farm - North America Finally Has Its First Offshore Wind Farm.

North America’s first offshore wind farm, Block Island Wind Farm, started operations last Wednesday and is expected to be in full swing by Thanksgiving. When it is running at full capacity, the farm will generate enough electricity to power 17,000 homes, or about 4 percent of all households in Rhode Island. It’s a modest U.S. launch for an industry that has been booming in Europe. But it’s a big win after 15 years of trying to get offshore wind power off the ground.

The Guardian has a look at the world's largest offshore wind farm - How the London Array blows away the competition in green energy

At the widest point of the Greater Thames estuary, 12 miles north of the Kent coast and 12 miles south of Essex, lies the London Array – the largest operational offshore wind farm in the world. Completed in 2013, after 10 years of planning and construction, it covers an area of 40 square miles – roughly the same size of Bristol – and comprises 175 individual turbines laid out in neat rows like an enormous nursery flower bed.

IEEE SPectrum has an article on the increasing size of offshore wind turbines - Belgium Claims World’s Largest Offshore Wind Turbine.

The largest offshore wind turbine on the planet is now spinning off of the coast of Belgium at the Belwind site. Alstom produced the six-megawatt Haliade turbine and installed it off of the Ostend harbor last weekend.

The blades stretch out more than 73 meters and the turbine towers more than 100 meters above sea level. The turbine does not have a gearbox but instead uses a permanent-magnet generator. Fewer mechanical parts means less maintenance and higher reliability, according to Alstom.

REW has an article on the construction of the world's largest wind turbines (7 MW) off Fife in Scotland - Securing the World’s Largest Wind Turbine.

At 7 megawatts (MW), Samsung Heavy Industries' S7.0-171 is the world's largest offshore wind turbine. The 196-metre tall structure is being installed 20 metres offshore in Fife, Scotland, with a connecting walkway to enable visitors to get up close to the structure. ...

In the next five years, an estimated 4,000 new fixed structures are scheduled to be installed in the North Sea alone. This is mainly due to the upsurge in offshore wind activity associated with Round 2 and Round 3 projects.

Windpower Engineering has an article on a small step towards building a north sea supergrid - ABB positioned highest voltage converter in North Sea.

ABB says it has installed the world’s highest-voltage offshore converter station in the North Sea. AC electricity generated in three wind farms off the coast of Germany will be converted on the platform into high-voltage direct current (HVDC) for transmission to the mainland. The 320 kV converter station has an 800 MW power transmission capacity making it the world’s most powerful installation of its kind.

IEEE SPectrum reports that the long awaited London Array wind farm has commenced operation offshore England - World's Biggest Offshore Wind Farm Switched On in Britain.

Around a year and a half ago, the Walney wind farm in the Irish Sea started spinning and prepared to relish the title of being "biggest in the world." It ended up enjoying that status a bit longer than expected, but the London Array, off the coast of Kent, now leaves Walney and its 367 megawatts in the dust.

Some numbers: 175 turbines. 630 megawatts. Half a million homes. 100 square kilometers. 450 kilometers of offshore cabling.

In other words, it's pretty big. The speed at which these enormous projects are popping around in the waters around the U.K. is impressive, especially considering the ongoing difficulties with getting even a single offshore turbine up and running in the U.S. (Cape Wind might have one by next year! Maybe!) There are now around 20 distinct offshore wind farms around the U.K., generating enough power for 2.3 million homes; when all offshore turbines that are spinning, in construction, or planned are combined, they total 15 gigawatts of capacity—about a quarter of the entire U.S. onshore wind power capabilities.

The London Array, owned by DONG Energy, E.ON, and the U.A.E.'s Masdar, looks to keep it's world's-biggest title for a bit longer than Walney held out, thanks to its already massive size and a phase 2 plan to bring it up to a full gigawatt. And some of the other big projects underway in the region won't be able to compete with that sort of girth: West of Duddon Sands farm will get to 389 MW, for example, while the Gwynt y Mor farm off the coast of Wales will reach 576 MW.

ReNews also has a report on a new 1.2GW wind farm planned for offshore the east coast of England - Hornsea enters the fray.

Smart Wind has submitted its application for the 1.2GW Hornsea phase one wind farm off the east coast of England. ... Hornsea Project One formally consists of the 600MW Njord and the 600MW Heron project. Offshore construction on both projects could start as early as 2016.

Energy Matters has an article on a new report from the European Wind Energy Association - Deep Water Wind Energy Could Power EU (And Then Some).

A new report from the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) states the power produced from turbines in deep waters in the North Sea alone could meet the EU’s electricity consumption - four times over.

"Offshore wind in Europe could be providing 145 million households with renewable electricity and employing 318,000 people by 2030, while providing energy security, technology exports, and no greenhouse gases," says the EWEA.

'Deep Water' in relation to wind turbines is considered to be depths of 50 metres or more. While the technology is still reasonably new, floating wind turbine designs are competitive in terms of the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) with bottom-fixed foundations in depths exceeding 50 metres.

Of all Europe’s grid connected offshore wind turbines currently in service, only two are not reliant on fixed foundations.

Acknowledging that the sector must overcome significant technical, economic and political challenges in order to properly tap deep water wind resources; the EWEA says if the challenges are overcome, the first deep offshore wind farms could be up and running by 2017.

Even at the shallow end of the pool, offshore wind power in the EU is a very big business. At the end of last year, 1,662 turbines totalling 5 GW capacity were operating in 55 wind farms in 10 European countries; producing 18 TWh of electricity - enough to power almost five million households.

Renewable Energy World has an update on efforts to encourage larger wind turbines for offshore wind power (and floating offshore wind power) - Gigantic Offshore Wind-turbine Testing in Progress.

In the course of the next five years, the HiPRWind (High Power, High Reliability Offshore Wind Technology) project will lay the foundations for delivery of a complete, fully functional offshore wind-turbine with a generating capacity of 10 – 20 MW. For comparison, modern wind–turbine capacities lie between 300 kW and 6 MW. ...

Plenty of Power

As well as developing a concept for a 10 – 20 MW turbine, the members of the project are also looking at how the units of a huge floating wind-farm far out to sea can be interconnected, and connected to the electricity grid ashore.

The advantages of locating wind-turbines offshore are well known. A better wind regime is the first of these; it simply blows harder out at sea. Next, larger schemes can be built; a single North Sea block of 60 x 60 km is capable of producing more electricity than all Norway’s hydropower plants combined, while ten blocks could supply enough electric power for the whole of Europe.

The problem is: how to do it? Wind-turbines are already standing in shallow water off the UK and Denmark. But in the future, coastal sites are going to become more crowded, and both environmental and resource considerations will mean that these installations will have to be located further from the coast. ...

Wind Energy in Norway -- Updates

Three potential concepts for wind energy generation are currently under development in Norway: Hywind and Sway are based on turbines mounted on monotowers moored to the seabed, while Wind-Sea has three rotors mounted on a floater in the form of an equilateral triangle. Hywind has been in operation since 2009, while the other two are still at the model stage. Hywind is moored off Karmøy in southwestern Norway, but as it is owned by Statoil it cannot be used for tests by research institutes.

SINTEF has a high level of expertise in wind-power, including offshore, and some ten researchers at SINTEF Energy Research work full-time in this field. When the Research Council of Norway set up eleven centres of research on environmentally friendly energy, SINTEF Energy Research was allocated the management of the Nowitech and Cedren centres. Nowitech focuses on offshore wind technology, while Cedren’s contribution is to the development and dissemination of environmentally friendly designs.

As a result, Nowitech in Trondheim and Norcowe in Bergen were given funding last year to build a floating test turbine that will gather data and test a number of different designs. They will also build a floating station for measurements of wind and waves.

The New York Times has a report on plans to build a transmission backbone for offshore wind power off the east coast of the US - Offshore Wind Power Line Wins Backing.

Google and a New York financial firm have each agreed to invest heavily in a proposed $5 billion transmission backbone for future offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard that could ultimately transform the region’s electrical map.

The 350-mile underwater spine, which could remove some critical obstacles to wind power development, has stirred excitement among investors, government officials and environmentalists who have been briefed on it.

Google and Good Energies, an investment firm specializing in renewable energy, have each agreed to take 37.5 percent of the equity portion of the project. They are likely to bring in additional investors, which would reduce their stakes.

If they hold on to their stakes, that would come to an initial investment of about $200 million apiece in the first phase of construction alone, said Robert L. Mitchell, the chief executive of Trans-Elect, the Maryland-based transmission-line company that proposed the venture.

Marubeni, a Japanese trading company, has taken a 15 percent stake. Trans-Elect said it hoped to begin construction in 2013.

Several government officials praised the idea underlying the project as ingenious, while cautioning that they could not prejudge the specifics.

“Conceptually it looks to me to be one of the most interesting transmission projects that I’ve ever seen walk through the door,” said Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees interstate electricity transmission. “It provides a gathering point for offshore wind for multiple projects up and down the coast.”

Industry experts called the plan promising, but warned that as a first-of-a-kind effort, it was bound to face bureaucratic delays and could run into unforeseen challenges, from technology problems to cost overruns. While several undersea electrical cables exist off the Atlantic Coast already, none has ever picked up power from generators along the way.

The system’s backbone cable, with a capacity of 6,000 megawatts, equal to the output of five large nuclear reactors, would run in shallow trenches on the seabed in federal waters 15 to 20 miles offshore, from northern New Jersey to Norfolk, Va. The notion would be to harvest energy from turbines in an area where the wind is strong but the hulking towers would barely be visible.

The Guardian has an article on a new British design for offshore wind turbines with a 275m wingspan that produce three times power of standard models - Engineers race to design world's biggest offshore wind turbines.

British, American and Norwegian engineers are in a race to design and build the holy grail of wind turbines – giant, 10MW offshore machines twice the size and power of anything seen before – that could transform the global energy market because of their economies of scale.

Today, a revolutionary British design that mimics a spinning sycamore leaf and which was inspired by floating oil platform technology, entered the race. Leading engineering firm Arup is to work with an academic consortium backed by blue-chip companies including Rolls Royce, Shell and BP to create detailed designs for the "Aerogenerator", a machine that rotates on its axis and would stretch nearly 275m from blade tip to tip. It is thought that the first machines will be built in 2013-14 following two years of testing.

But the all-British team of designers and engineers, which includes Eden project architects Grimshaw, is in stiff competition with other groups. Earlier this year US wind company Clipper, which has close ties with the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, announced plans to build 10MW "Britannia" turbines in north-east England.

Based on a scaled-up version of the conventional wind turbines now common in the British landscape, these giants would be fixed to the sea bed but would stand nearly 600ft high above the waves. If they prove technically and financially feasible, each turbine should be able to generate enough electricity to provide 5,000-10,000 homes and, says Clipper, should create energy equivalent to 2m barrels of oil in their 25-year lifetime.

Meanwhile, Norwegian firm Sway is planning to build massive floating turbines that would stick straight out of the sea from 100m-deep floating "masts" anchored to the sea bed. An EU-sponsored research project is also investigating 8–10MW turbines, and other American and Danish companies are planning 9MW machines. Full-scale prototyes of all three leading designs are expected to be complete within three years.

"There is a wonderful race on. It's very tight and the prize is domination of the global offshore wind energy market," said Feargal Brennan, head of offshore engineering at Cranfield University, where much of the Aerogenerator development work has been carried out.

"The UK has come late to the race, but with 40 years of oil and gas experience we have the chance to lead the world. The new [Aero-generator] turbine is based on semi-submersible oil platform technology and does not have the same weight constraints as a normal wind turbine. The radical new design is half the height of an equivalent [conventional] turbine," he said. He added that the design could be expanded to produce turbines that generated 20MW or more.

Ecogeek has a post on an offshore wind farm planned for the US great lakes - Nation's First Freshwater Offshore Wind Farm Planned for Lake Erie.

It's an exciting time in wind energy these days. The U.S. will be getting its first offshore wind farm thanks to Cape Wind's long-awaited approval, and now plans for the first freshwater offshore wind farm in the U.S. have been announced as well. The Lake Erie Energy Development Corp has signed a deal with GE to purchase five offshore wind turbines destined for the Ohio waters of the lake.

The 4-MW turbines will be placed three to five miles offshore though their exact planned location isn't known. This is expected to be the first order of many from the development corp that has made a goal of having 1 GW of freshwater-based wind energy online by 2020.

MNN has a look at how much offshore wind power could have been built for the amount of money spent on the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster - Offshore oil vs. offshore wind ... who wins?.

In my fact-digging on the now sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig, I came across a stat about the construction and operational costs of BP's failed rig which was to tap an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil from two recent oil discoveries (the Kaskida and the Tiber) over a 25-year period. According to Morningstar analysts (who published a study back in March), the projected investment for both wells was between $8 billion and $12 billion U.S.

So that got me thinking, just how much offshore wind could be bought for the equivalent $12 billion investment? My back of the envelope calculations were enlightening. Here we go ...

1. What is the cost of offshore wind power?

We have a good comp in the form of Alpha Ventus, a 12-turbine project off the shores of Germany which was recently completed. The project was the first of its kind and as might be expected, it ran over budget. According to Spiegel, the total project cost $282 million (it was estimated at just under $200 million) which includes upkeep costs over 25 years. Alpha Ventus is a 60 megawatt array, enough to power about 50,000 U.S. homes or 550 million kilowatts of electricity per year (a typical U.S. home uses 11,000 kilowatts).

2. How many turbines can $10 billion buy?

Projecting that the next few big offshore projects will drop in price as manufacturing and grid infrastructure improves, let's say a 60 megawatt project will go for $200 million. Divide that by $12 billion and you get sixty 60-megawatt wind projects, or about 33 billion kilowatts of power capacity per year.

3. How many electric cars does that power?

A typical American drives 12,000 miles per year. The latest plug-in electric vehicles (like the much-anticipated Tesla Sedan) use about 370 wH's per mile. The typical U.S. driver would need 12,000 x .37 = 4,440 kilowatts per year. Divide 33 billion by 4,440 kilowatts and you get about 7.4 million electric vehicles that could be powered each year by a $10 billion wind investment.

4. How many cars could Deepwater Horizon have fueled?

44 gallons of gasoline are made from each barrel of crude. Deepwater Horizon was to produce 7 billion barrels of crude over its 25 year life span. 7 billion x 44 = 308 billion gallons of gas divided by 25 years = 12. 3 billions gallons of gas per year. Let's say as cars become more efficient the average U.S. car goes up to a 26 mpg average. 26 mpg x 12.3 billion = 320 billion miles. Divide that by our 12,000 mile national average and you get 26.7 million gas cars per year from the $10 billion offshore drilling investment.

5. What's the end cost for the consumer?

You can see why as a nation we like oil so much ... it yields about 3-4 times more transportation power per dollar invested. But it's important to note that the cost of gasoline for the end-user is considerably higher than electricity. In the end the consumer pays dearly for all that convenient fossil fuel. Right now gasoline is about $3 per gallon and the typical car gets 22 mpg. So the typical gasoline mile costs us about 13.6 cents or $1,632 per year (oil). Grid electricity is about 10 cents per kilowatt, so one mile on electricity costs only 3.7 cents, or $444 per year (wind). If you figure that 7.4 million Americans would be saving $1,188 per year, that is about $8.8 billion going back into the U.S. economy rather than into the grubby hands of foreign oil companies like BP.

6. What if you factor in environmental costs?

Now if we start factoring in the massive cleanup costs, it changes the game significantly. Current estimates are putting the BP cleanup bill at $22.6 billion. This figure will be matched (at least) by U.S. taxpayers in the form of government assistance programs. So that puts the total estimated Deepwater Horizon pricetag at $55 billion ($10B + $22.5B + $22.5B), assuming it's even possible to clean up the spill at all.

7. Comparing apples and lemons ...

As a comparison exercise, let's say that instead of sinking on Day 1, the Deepwater Horizon sunk halfway though its lifespan. It would have powered 13.4 million cars at a cost of $55 billion ... about $4,100 per car (oil). Our wind turbines would have powered 3.7 million cars at $10 billion or about $2,700 per car (wind). Since "windspills" have never been known to cause any impact whatsoever and oil spills are quite frequent (according to NOAA in one sample year alone there were 257 oil spills) this seems more than a fair comparison and puts wind in the lead, both from the perspective of investment and consumer spending.

Of course, this sad little number game will never make up for the incalculable losses to the fishing industry, the tourist industry, the health of wetlands, the survival of wildlife, the carcinogens that are now leaking into the water systems of Gulf residents — all things for which BP will never pay. We, the American people however, will pay those prices for a very, very long time to come.

You get my drift ... it is time to change the way we think about offshore energy resources and start switching to safe, clean wind power.

Triple Pundit reports that the US has given its first offshore wind power plant the go-ahead - Cape Wind Project Approved in Huge Boost For American Clean Energy.

This afternoon in Boston, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that a massive wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, would move forward, despite intense local opposition.

Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts said construction on the farm was expected to start within a year. “America needs offshore wind power and with this project, Massachusetts will lead the nation,” Patrick said at a press conference.

Secretary Salazar said at the press conference that it was unacceptable for the project to have taken nine years, and expressed confidence that future wind projects would take less time.

Salazar’s decision sets an important precedent for the development of offshore wind farms in the United States and, indirectly, American clean energy in general, by demonstrating that the administration is willing to push past prominent opposition to move such projects forward. Opponents of the Cape Wind farm include a local Native American tribe and the Kennedy family, whose estate in Hyannis Port overlooks the site of the farm.

“I think this is likely the shot heard ‘round the world for American clean energy,” Ian Bowles, secretary of the Massachusett’s executive office of environmental affairs, told the New York Times. The paper has been following the story doggedly the last couple of days.

When completed, Cape Wind would have 130 turbines reaching 440 feet above the water spread out over a 24 square mile area of Nantucket Sound, about five miles from shore. The farm has a nameplate capacity of 468 megawatts, but is expected to generate an average of 170 megawatts, or about 75 percent of the electricity needed for Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

But Cape Wind’s symbolic power far surpasses its megawatts. When completed, it will be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, presumably easing the way for dozens of other proposed farms, mainly along the Eastern seaboard.

Wind power has shown itself to be increasingly competitive with fossil fuels in generating electricity. The state of Texas generates as much as 19 percent of its electricity from wind, and plans a massive expansion of its generating capacity in wind-swept West Texas in the years ahead.

Renewable Energy World has an article on the need to expand transmission capacity to handle increased generation from offshore wind farms in Europe - Transmission Stalls European Offshore Wind Power.

Germany's first offshore wind farm has been built and is now generating electricity. Dozens more wind farms are slated for construction over the next few years – as part of the German government's push to install 10,000 megawatts (MW) offshore wind capacity by 2020. But all of them will need to plug into powerful grids, both offshore and onshore, to transport the thousands of MW of additional renewable energy across the country and possibly beyond, and these may be slow in coming.

Germany’s first offshore wind farm has been online since the end of last year. The twelfth and last wind turbine in the Alpha Ventus park, off the North Sea island of Borkum, was built in November. The park is the first to employ a dozen 5-MW-class wind turbines, located 45 kilometers (34 miles) offshore in waters 30 meters (33 yards) deep. It will provide enough electricity to power 50,000 homes.

Alpha Ventus is the first of many planned wind parks in Germany. The government has approved plans to dedicate special zones off its northern coast to house up to 40 offshore wind parks that could provide electricity to more than 8 million households. The plan calls for setting aside zones between 12 and 200 kilometers of the northern shores. Of the 40 wind farms, 30 will be in the North Sea and 10 in the Baltic Sea. More than 25 of the planned farms have already received approval, with the bulk of them in the North Sea.

In total there will be more than 12,000 MW of offshore wind electricity by 2030, the equivalent of 12 medium-size nuclear plants, according to the German Federal Transport Ministry. The government’s plan is to double the current amount of energy supplied by wind in the country to 12 percent by 2020. Indeed, wind plays a big role in the energy plans of German policymakers to satisfy 30 percent of the country’s energy needs with renewable energy resources by 2030.

REW has an article on some large scale offshore win power developments in Europe - Iberdrola To Build 400-MW Baltic Offshore Wind Farm.

Iberdrola Renovables has bought 100% of the rights to build the Ventotec Ost 2 offshore wind complex in the German zone of the Baltic Sea. The rights were purchased from a German joint venture comprising Deutsche Erneuerbare Energien GmbH and Ventotec GmbH. They were awarded the permit in 2007.

The Ventotec Ost 2 offshore wind complex is far along in the permitting process and is expected to be commissioned by 2014. The wind farm’s 80 wind turbines, each with a capacity of of 5 megawatts (MW), are expected to generate a total of 1,200 gigawatt-hours (GWh).

The project is located in the northern part of the priority wind area known as Westlich Adlergrund, and will be built approximately 40 kilometers from shore. The average depth of the water is approximately 39 meters.

The German government has set a target of installing at least 10,000 MW of offshore wind capacity by 2020 and Iberdrola recently created an Offshore Wind Division designed to channel the development of this significant volume of offshore wind power.

Recently, Iberdrola and Vattenfall were awarded the construction rights to build one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world in the United Kingdom. The North Sea zone, known as East Anglia Array, has the potential to develop up to 7,200 MW, with construction is expected to begin in 2015.

The company is also involved in the development of several further offshore projects in Germany and has a pipeline of 2,300 MW in the United Kingdom, including the 500-MW West of Duddon Sands facilities, which it will start construction onin 2012, and Argyll Array, which will have an installed capacity of up to 1800 MW.

Jerome a Paris has a post at TOD on some of the issues involved in constructing offshore wind farms - There is (offshore wind powered) light at the end of the tunnel!.

I went on a visit of the port site in Zeebrugge where the foundations for the Belwind offshore wind farm (the financing of which I worked on) have been stored before their installation and wanted to give you a glimpse of the kind of logistics that entails and what kind of problems can happen (and how they are solved).

Follow me below for a tour of a small bit of Europe's fastest growing heavy industry.

As a quick reminder, there are 3 main types of foundations for offshore turbines: monopiles, gravity-based, and jackets/tripods. ...

Inhabitat has a post on the commissioning of the world's largest offshore wind farm - the 209 MW Horns Rev 2 plant off Denmark - Denmark Brings World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Online.

With a price tag of $1 billion, Horns Rev isn’t cheap. But the project could offset some serious carbon emissions and help Europe achieve its goal of getting 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2020. If offshore wind projects continue, the European Wind Energy Association predicts that offshore turbines could produce as much as 10% of the EU’s power in the next 11 years.

The US has been reluctant to get on board with offshore wind power, mostly because of the increased cost of offshore energy, maintenance concerns, and naysayers who think the turbines are unsightly. But with Europe expecting offshore wind to provide up to 200,000 new jobs by 2025, perhaps the US should think twice before dismissing the technology.

TreeHugger has a post on the large volume of offshore wind power projects planned for Scotland - 6.4 Gigawatts of Offshore Wind Farms Slated for Scotland.

A couple months back it was announced that the UK's Crown Estate would be helping out with financing pre-construction costs for offshore wind farms . Now comes word that The Crown Estate—which owns development rights in UK waters out to 200 miles—has offered exclusive agreements to nine companies for the development of offshore wind farms in Scottish waters totaling more than 6 GW of power. There are 10 plans on the table under these agreements:

The largest is the Argyll Array at 1,500 MW, to be developed by Scottish Power Renewables.

Airtricity Holdings has a sites amounting to 2,678 MW (Kintyre, 378 MW; Islay, 680 MW; Beatrice 920 MW; Bell Rock 700 MW).

Inch Cape will see 905 MW of wind power developed by NPower Renewables.

Fred Olsen Renewables will develop 415 MW at the Forth Array.

Mainstream Renewable Power, 360 MW at Neart na Gaoithe; E.ON , 300 MW in Solway Firth; and Dong Wind (UK), 280 MW in Wigtown Bay.

The total capacity of all these plans, assuming all are completed of course, is 6,438 MW.

In my post on floating offshore wind power I noted some schemes that used oil rig technology. Greentech Media has a post on a company trying a variant that uses oil rig type platforms that are fixed to the ocean floor - When Oil Rig Met Wind Turbine.

What do you get when you crossbreed an offshore drilling platform with a wind turbine? A cheaper way to get wind power, according to SeaEnergy Renewables.

The company – founded last June by a group of oil industry veterans – wants to popularize a somewhat new technique for installing offshore oil turbines that it claims will cut the cost of wind energy and let wind developers place their turbines further out to sea. The company, which will both build and operate the wind farms, hopes to be generate 1 gigawatt of wind energy off the coast of Scotland in five years and be pulling in £500 million in revenue a year. The ultimate goal is to have 3 to 5 gigawatts under its control, said CEO Joel Staadecker in an interview.

In a nutshell, the company plans to place large (5.5 megawatt plus) wind turbines on top of jackets – i.e., four-legged stools measuring 61 meters or more in length – rather than the familiar single white monopile common to the wind industry. The jackets were developed in the oil and gas industry. The jacket is placed in the water separately. The turbine is then dragged out to sea by boats and placed on it after the jacket is anchored.

"We think the same skill set [building oil platforms] maps to marine energy," he said.

The company next week will find out if it has won one or more bids to acquire leases to develop wind farms in three different locations off of Scotland. It is also bidding on leases to build wind farms in other parts of the U.K. Those bids will be announced toward the end of the year.

Aberdeen is either a logical or unlikely spot for wind energy experiments, depending on your point of view. The city rocketed to prosperity in the 1980s with the exploitation of the U.K.'s North Sea oil reserves just off the coast. At that time, fishing fleets transformed themselves into energy services companies. Although heavily associated with oil (and the flashy money that goes along with oil and gas), the city now hopes to do the same with wind. So think of it as a little bit of Texas in Europe (though without the 10-gallon hats).

The E.U. is soon expected to approve the development of a €40 million wind energy test site off the coast of Aberdeen.

The jacket technique has already been tried twice to create two 5.5-megawaatt turbines off the coast of Aberdeen. The two turbines provide power to oil rigs in the Beatrice field a few kilometers off the coast. The wind turbines are two and three years old. (We have some video coming of them later.) Those two turbines were built by the Talisman, a large oil company. SeaEnergy bought the rights to and is turning the idea into a company.

More than 40 jacket turbines will be installed by the end of next year, he said.

The technique has a few advantages, pointed out Allan MacAskill, business development director for SeaEnergy. First, it costs less to build the turbine because the business end of the gigantic device – the gearbox and spinning blades – can be assembled on shore. The less construction you do at sea, the better, he said. One of the chief achievements in this area revolved around figuring out a way to mount the turbine, which sits on a bobbing ship, onto a fixed platform. The problem was solved by inserting hydraulic jacks on the jacket, which can take the mass from the ships when the ships dip with the waves. Once the turbine is on the platform, it is turned until the bolt holes on the turbine base match with the jacket.

Second, the four-legged jacket gives the turbine more stability in deep water. The first two jacket-based turbines are in 39 meters of water. Most conventional offshore turbines are confined to areas where the water is closer to 20 meters in depth. Although European voters overwhelmingly want renewable energy, coastal communities often complain about the site of turbines. You can see the two existing Beatrice turbines from the shore, but you have to drive to a particular part of the coast and squint, said MacAskill. And the skies have to be clear.

Later turbines will be placed 60 meters out and likely generate 6, 7 or even 10 gigawatts of power.

Third, they use less steel and steel is money. The jackets and transition platforms for the two Beatrice wind turbines weigh less than 1,000 tons each, said MacAskill. Conventional offshore turbines of the same size weigh more than 1,000 tons, he claimed.

Wind is big here. Scotland boasts that it has 25 percent of Europe's wind resources. In the Orkney Islands north of the mainland, trees only grow in sheltered areas because of the wind: next to a house, a tree will only grow to the roofline. Otherwise, the land only supports grass and short bushes. The U.K. says it wants to get 15 percent of its power from renewables by 2020. Scotland on its own is shooting for 50 percent from renewables by then. The U.K., as a whole, is aiming at generating 25 gigawatts of power from offshore wind by 2020. Currently, Europe's total offshore wind power is close to 1 gigawatt.

The Orkney Islands pretty much live up to their billing as the edge of civilization. Controlled by Scandinavia until near the end of the Middle Ages, the islands directly above the mainland are sparsely populated and get some of the most severe weather in Europe. Trees are rare because of the high winds. Neolithic stone circles dot the landscape.

The region, however, is also home to the European Marine Energy Centre, an E.U. institution that has created wave and tidal test centers. The test centers allow marine energy companies to test the performance of their devices in somewhat rough seas. The test centers also are connected to the grid. Thus, companies aren't just testing the sea-worthiness of their devices. They can also study power production.

TreeHugger reports on a large new offshore wind farm planned for Wales - 750 MW Offshore Wind Farm Approved for Wales.

he pound may be tanking against world currencies, credit may be scarce, and very real fears of deep economic recession abound, but that hasn't stopped Npower Renewables' plans for a giant new wind farm off the Welsh coast. Approved this week by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Gwynt y Môr wind farm will be located 10 miles offshore from Llandudno, Wales. The tech details (such as they are) are as follows:

Expected to begin feeding electricity into the grid in 2012, the 750 MW, 250 turbine wind farm will (when combined three nearby, smaller wind farms) create enough power for 680,000 homes. Construction of onshore portions of the projection should begin in 2009, with offshore portions commencing in 2011.

With the approval of this project, the total offshore projects with planning approval has risen to 4.5 GW, according to the British Wind Energy Association. In October, the UK surpassed Denmark as the world’s number one offshore wind power producer.