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?
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.
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
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.
