this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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‘World’s largest offshore wind farm’ produces power for the first time (www.euronews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Impressive scale, with mills the size of Rockefeller center and the farm's extent equal to London. Still only 5 percent of UK's energy consumption when they are operating at max capacity. Two things come to mind:

  • What was the cost in terms of climate gases to build and install these, and what are the plans for their eventual decommissioning?
  • What are the impacts on atmospheric flows, especially if this was scaled up to cover a larger part of UK consumption, and joined by similar installations from other countries?
[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago

No, they are going to produce 5% of the UKs electricity consumption, when the park has all wind turbines installed. Right now that is not the case, so it is a bit missleading to call it the worlds largest offshore wind park right now.

[–] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] spacedout@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's very comprehensive, 100s of pages of technical and impact reporting. I'm not trying to undermine the project, was just curious and hoping for a ELI5 kind of thing.

[–] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

When you divide the total emissions associated with a wind turbine by the amount of electricity it will produce in its lifetime, it works out at about 6 g of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity.1

By comparison, power generation based on fossil fuels involves burning more coal, oil or gas for every kWh of electricity, on top of the one-off carbon emissions from construction and decommissioning. For coal, this adds up to approximately 900 g per kWh.

https://orsted.com/en/insights/the-fact-file/what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-offshore-wind