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The world’s deepest offshore wind turbine foundation was recently constructed 17 miles off the coast of Scotland. The Saipem 7000, the world’s third biggest semi-submersible crane vessel, deposited the nearly 441,000-pound “jacket,” or foundation, at a depth of 58.6 metres—just over 192 feet—last week. It was the 112th jacket erected at the 114-turbine Seagreen wind farm, which when completely operational later this year would be Scotland’s largest.
These wind turbines function similarly to an inverted fan. Instead of using electricity to produce wind, they use wind to generate power. The narrow blades are designed like aircraft wings, and as the wind passes over them, the air pressure on one side drops. The difference in air pressure across the blade produces lift and drag, causing the rotor to spin. The rotating rotor then drives a generator, which sends power to the grid.
Seaward wind ranches like Seagreen have various benefits over land-based breeze turbines. It is simpler to reliably generate greater quantities of electricity because wind speeds at sea are typically faster and more consistent than over land. Changes in wind speed, no matter how slight, can have a significant impact: A turbine can produce twice as much electricity in a 15-mph wind as it does in a 12-mph wind.
Additionally, seaside regions often have high energy necessities. In the US, in excess of 40% of the populace, exactly 127 million individuals, live in waterfront provinces. There is less need for long-distance energy transmission when power is generated offshore close to where it is used, and cities don’t have to give up space that is already limited to power plants.
Obviously, the greatest benefit of any wind ranch is that they can give sustainable power without radiating poisonous ecological toxins or ozone harming substances. Even though they can have other effects on the environment for which engineers are looking for solutions, they don’t even require or use important non-petrochemical resources like water.
The newly constructed foundations at Seagreen will each support a Vestas V164-10 MW turbine. These turbines will be enormous, with rotor diameters of around 540 feet—more than one and a half football fields—and rising up to 672 feet tall—more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. In ideal conditions, each one will be capable to producing up to 10,000 kilowatts (KW).
When the wind farm is fully operational later this year, the 114 wind turbines will have a combined capacity of 1,075 megawatts (MW), despite the fact that Seagreen actually began producing electricity last summer. The wind farm is expected to produce approximately 5,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity annually, which is sufficient to supply clean and sustainable power to over 1.6 million UK households. However, this is not enough to make it into the top 100 US power plants. That amounts to roughly two-thirds of Scotland’s population.
The Seagreen site actually demonstrates how far wind power has come. Seagreen will still displace more than 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would have otherwise been released by Scottish electricity generation, despite the fact that wind farms do not yet have the capacity to completely replace power plants powered by fossil fuels. Seagreen says that’s the same as taking a third of all cars in Scotland off the road.
