The 300-megawatt Thanet offshore wind farm slated for completion this year has tried producing electricity for the first time that was fed to Britain’s National Grid.
The offshore wind project being built off the coast of Kent is predicted to become the largest in the world once it is finished.
Situated in an area with wind speeds between 10 meters to 13 meters per second, the Thanet project generated between 2 MW and 2.8 MW of electricity on a test run on May 16.
The Thanet wind farm, which Swedish utility Vattenfall A.B. acquired in late 2008, is a £780 million ($1.119 billion) project located 12 kilometers off Foreness Point. The project has been under construction since January 2008 and Vattenfall said it will be finished by around midyear. Seventy-three of the 100 3-MW Vestas V90 wind turbines have been installed.
“This is a major milestone in the construction of the wind farm,” said Ole Bigum Nielsen, head of offshore projects at Vattenfall. “We are proud to be producing first power from our turbines. Everyone has worked very hard and in spite of difficult winter weather, we have kept out schedule.”
Vattenfall said the Thanet offshore wind farm will boost Britain’s offshore capacity by more that 30 percent and will provide renewable energy for 240,000 households.
Difficulties have been met in building the wind farm, ownership of which changed hands over the past years. It was initially conceived in 2003 by Warwick Energy, which expected it to be built by 2009. But in September 2007, Warwick and its partners sold the project to Cristofferson Robb & Company, which then sold it to Vattenfall in November 2008.
Warwick continued overseeing project construction until October 2008. Vattenfall is now responsible for completing the project.
Swedish government-owned Vattenfall is one of the biggest wind power operators in Britain and is the fifth largest energy producer in Europe. Aside from Thanet, they already own and operate another project in Kent, the 90-MW Kentish Flats offshore wind farm off Herne Bay-Whitstable, which has been in commercial operation since December 2005.
But Thanet itself could be dwarfed by the world’s largest offshore wind farm being planned, the London Arraywind farm which is being built 20 km off the Thames Estuary, also in Britain. Its first phase will see the installation of 630 MW of wind capacity by 2012, although it is intended to reach a massive 1,000-MW capacity in the future.
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