Will floating wind farms help achieve net zero emissions targets?

The UK faces a huge energy, economic and environmental opportunity. Work has just begun at the Port of Bristol to build a new deep-water terminal that will manufacture, assemble and ship floating wind farms out to sea. The impressive venture is one of the most important steps toward meeting net-zero emissions targets, and at the same time an important developmental boost for the entire region.

New terminal will support three large wind farms

The Bristol Port Company (BPC) is a company that bought the local port from Bristol City Council in 1990 and turned it into a modern enterprise employing nearly 600 people and offering high-quality cargo handling services. As part of the expansion of its operations on October 8 this year. BPC officially announced plans to build a new terminal within the Avonmouth docks.

The Bristol Wind Terminal, slated for completion in 2030, will include the infrastructure needed to manufacture, collate, integrate and deploy floating wind farms. It will first support three new windmill farms being built in the Celtic Sea as part of The Crown Estate’s fifth round of siting proceedings.

The project envisages the installation of 260 turbines, each of which will be 300 meters high and placed on a drifting platform the size of a soccer field. More than 1,000 anchors and 321 km of mooring limbs will take care of their stabilization. In addition, more than 800 km of cables will connect the turbines to the power grid. Ultimately, the three new farms are expected to provide 4.5 GW of renewable energy, which will power 4 million British homes.

Construction of the terminal itself will begin in 2027 and will include a new wharf, a slipway for launching the resulting structures, and a widened breakwater. The planned infrastructure will enable the production of both steel and concrete floating turbine parts.

The economic importance of the project

Three new floating wind farms in the Celtic Sea are expected to generate an additional 5,300 onshore jobs – new jobs will be created not only in Bristol’s port, but also in the supply chain associated with the development. The region could add as many as 40,000 by 2040. new jobs. The entire investment is expected to inject £1.4 billion into the British economy.

According to Gus Juspert, managing director at The Crown Estate, the UK off-shore sector is already an example of global success. Floating wind farms represent new opportunities for the entire country and the region around the Celtic Sea. It is worth noting that the next round of differential contracts for offshore wind in the UK will bring further investment of £1.5 billion. The Crown Estate’s total portfolio stands at £16 billion, and according to Juspert, the UK economy will gain as much as £25 billion in the long term from the expansion of the farms. In 2030. The off-shore energy sector in the Islands is expected to employ more than 100,000 people, including many highly skilled professionals from various industries.

British domination of the seas

Ed Miliband, the UK’s zero emissions secretary, has expressed the view that floating wind farms are today the dominant global technology that will play a key role in efforts to achieve energy independence, create new jobs and deal with climate change. The UK is already the second (after China) biggest off-shore wind power in the world.

According to The Crown Estate’s 2023 report, 2,766 wind turbines with a total capacity of 15 GW are already operating in UK territorial waters, providing power for 14.2 million homes. Last year they produced a total of 49 TWh of electricity. It’s hardly surprising, then, that in just one year the share of offshore wind power in the UK’s energy mix rose from 14 to 17 percent. A further 12 percent of energy is generated by onshore turbines, and 14 percent comes from nuclear power plants. As a result, fossil fuels accounted for less than 40 percent of the country’s energy sources in 2023. Renewable energy has thus reduced the amount of carbon dioxide emissions by 18.5 million tons.

British wind farms are distributed in various locations along the coast – from the northeast to the very south. This diversification is proving to be a very apt strategy, as it makes it possible to take advantage of different wind conditions throughout the year. According to data from The Crown Estate for 2023, the strongest month was July, when energy production exceeded the average by 39 percent, while May was 35 percent below the monthly average.

How will floating wind farms change Britain’s energy industry?

The Crown Estate is by no means resting on its laurels and promises further development of off-shore wind energy. Already there are plans to increase the capacity of farms in the Celtic Sea to 12 GW. This year, offshore windmills are expected to cover the energy needs of 56 percent of British households. The target is for all British offshore turbines to reach 50 GW in 2030 – 268,000 square ^kilometers of seabed will be developed, an area twice the size of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Floating wind farms make it possible to take advantage of wind potential in more remote waters with great depth. Their production is very economical, and the construction process itself does not require specialized knowledge of marine engineering.

The key to success, however, is not only the efficiency of the farms themselves, but also the transmission network. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the availability of energy from off-shore farms. Unplanned power outages still occur, however, and are, according to The Crown Estate, one of the biggest challenges for years to come.

Other challenges include extending the life of existing offshore turbines and repowering, that is, erecting new turbines to replace those going out of service. Life extension, in particular, has very significant benefits, avoiding the use of 136 tons of steel, 8 tons of glass and 4 tons of polymers per MW of energy produced. In addition, emissions can be reduced by 470 tons of_CO2 per MW by this means.

A benefit to the marine environment?

It is difficult not to view off-shore energy through the lens of marine ecosystems. After all, even floating wind farms require anchoring to the bottom, interfering with the underwater world. With an eye toward mitigating the effects of this intervention, The Crown Estate launched a pioneering Whole of Seabed Program in 2023 to map the seabed using modern technology. The program will help determine in which zones off-shore energy can be reconciled with natural habitats.

Already since 2003, information has been collected as part of the Marine Data Exchange, a publicly available database on, among other things, geophysical features of the bottom, sedimentology, but also species of fish, birds and marine mammals. In 2023. It was used by more than 5,000 users, and total data resources amounted to 268 TB, with an estimated value of 1.54 billion British pounds. With the development of off-shore energy, the British want not only to achieve the goal of zero net emissions, but also to ensure a secure future, including for the environment.