..or maybe cold?
During January 2010 the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (what a strange coupling of ideologies for a government department?) released the winning bids from developers for the third round of offshore wind farms - forming nine Round 3 zones off the coastline of Britain as follows:
source: bwea.com
All winning bidders will benefit from exclusive rights to develop wind farms within their zones - subject to staying within individual Zone Development Agreements which set out basic issues such as maximum capacity to be developed, scale of turbines, etc
February saw the beginning of detailed plans by the developers - commissioning planners, infrastructure advisors, port operators and other associated consultants are all being assembled. The developers will hold 12 events across the country to fill their supply chains with partner organisations. All to be done by the end of March (but of course everyone involved has had plenty of advance notice).
The third phase of offshore wind farm development is by far the largest so far in the UK, with a maximum generation capacity of 32GW - enough to feed around 19.2 million homes (equivalent to an impressive 76% of the 25.2 million estimated households in Britain at 2009).
The cost is going to be around £100bn. And that's a minimum to get things started.
So the future may well turn out to be a load of cold air unless the funding is secured.
And given the green credentials of offshore wind and the lack of anybody's backyard out there in the oceans for people to complain about that really would be a shame.
Loads more info at the Renewable Energy UK website here
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