Powerful Winds Of Change

Technological improvements and falling costs are driving a boom in offshore wind power projects worldwide. Still, the industry faces its own peculiar share of challenges

- Mandvi Singh and Shweta Miriam Koshy

TECHNOLOGY HAS come a long way since windmills were used centuries ago to mill grain or pump water. Modern wind turbines are highly evolved versions and the utility-scale ones are over 100 m tall and can power thousands of homes. A wind farm is an area with a high density of turbines for electricity generation—their history goes back over a century, when engineers saw that a cluster of turbines on land could improve the electricity generation profile. The nomenclature has changed and these farms are now called onshore wind farms—the reason for this is the relatively new and fascinating story of offshore wind farms. The basics are the same: harnessing the energy of wind, but by building wind farms in oceans where speeds are higher and land is not a concern. The electricity produced by offshore wind turbines travels back to land through a series of cable systems that lay on the seabed.

The UK has led the charge on offshore wind installations and is currently the country with most installations by a mile. Renewable energy sources generated more electricity in the UK than fossil fuel power plants for the first, straight three-month period since recordkeeping began more than 100 years ago, according to an analysis published by UK-based website Carbon Brief on October 14, 2019. Wind farms, solar panels, biomass and hydropower projects generated an estimated 29.5 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity in the third quarter between July and September of 2019, marginally exceeding the 29.1 TWhs produced by plants that run on fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil.