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SSE Renewables has announced the installation of the world’s deepest offshore wind turbine foundations at what it claims will become Scotland’s largest offshore windfarm off the coast of Angus.

The foundation, also known as the “jacket”, had been transferred to the Seagreen wind farm on the 7 April by contractor Seaway 7. It was then taken by a submersible crane vessel, the Saipem 7000, to be installed on the seabed. The foundations weigh about 2000 tonnes each.

SSE has beaten its own record, from October 2022, when it installed foundations at a depth of 57.4 metres (188 feet). The latest foundations have been installed at 58.6 metres below sea level. It is the 112th jacket to be installed at the wind farm, which will have 114 turbines.

The project is a £3 billion joint venture between SSE Renewables and TotalEnergies. SSE said the final turbine foundation would be installed later this week.

SSE recently announced plans to build the UK’s largest offshore windfarm at Berwick Bank in Scotland. The project could generate 4.1GW of electricity and is situated 38km off the coast of East Lothian. A final decision on the project is expected later in 2023.

Read more: Current+

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Wind power could save each UK household nearly £250 in savings per year compared to gas, says new analysis conducted by RenewableUK.

The analysis showed that the 19GW of wind farm capacity that won Contracts for Difference (CfDs) support will generate around 93TWh by the time it is all operational in 2027. This is around 30% of the annual UK electricity generation at present. This will be at a total cost of £5 billion.

RenewableUK stated that the equivalent cost of getting that electricity from gas would be around £26 billion at current prices, so this represents a saving to consumers of over £20 billion, with every UK household benefitting by £246 a year.

The CfD scheme has been a resounding success for the wind industry. The most recent CfD auction saw offshore wind farms win contracts at a fixed electricity price four times cheaper than the current cost of gas power stations. Auction Round Four saw the five offshore wind projects win contracts to secure a strike price of £37.35/MWh.

As well as this, CfD projects are predicted to pay back £25 this winter, and around £45 a year to each household from next winter. This is set to continue to grow as more low cost windfarms come online.

Read more: Current+

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Tories urged to look at onshore windfarms which can be built as cheaply as gas plants and deliver the same power for half the cost of Hinkley Point, says Arup

Onshore windfarms could be built in the UK for the same cost as new gas power stations and would be nearly half as expensive as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, according to a leading engineering consultant.

Arup found that the technology has become so cheap that developers could deliver turbines for a guaranteed price of power so low that it would be effectively subsidy-free in terms of the impact on household energy bills.

France’s EDF was awarded a contract for difference – a top-up payment – of £92.50 per megawatt hour over 35 years for Hinkley’s power, or around twice the wholesale price of electricity.

By contrast, Arup’s report found that windfarms could be delivered for a maximum of £50-55 per MWh across 15 years.

ScottishPower, which commissioned the analysis, hopes to persuade the government to reconsider its stance on onshore windfarms, which the Conservatives effectively blocked in 2015 by banning them from competing for subsidies and imposing new planning hurdles.

Keith Anderson, the firm’s chief operating officer, told the Guardian that onshore wind could help the UK meet its climate targets, was proven in terms of being easy to deliver, and was now “phenomenally competitive” on price.

“If you want to control the cost of energy, and deliver energy to consumers and to businesses across the UK at the most competitive price, why would you not want to use this technology? This report demonstrates it’s at the leading edge of efficiency,”

he said.

The big six energy firm believes that with a cap on top-up payments so close to the wholesale price, onshore windfarms would be effectively subsidy-free – but the guaranteed price would be enough to de-risk projects and win the investment case for them.

Read more: The Guardian

The sound made by 100 tonnes of steel and carbon fibre rotating 400 feet overhead is surprisingly understated. Each whoosh of the 260 foot blades spans an area the size of the London Eye and generates enough electricity to power the average British home for 24 hours.

There are 32 of these 8MW turbines in the second phase of Dong Energy’s Burbo Bank wind farm spinning off the Merseyside coast.

They are the most powerful ever, dotting an area the size of almost 6,000 football pitches within the Irish Sea, each one a beacon of Britain’s global dominance in the booming offshore wind industry.

Benj Sykes, the UK boss for Dong Energy’s wind power business, predicts he may be cutting the ribbon on turbines with double this power capacity by 2024.

“If you wind the clock back four or five years, this scale of technology was considered very ambitious. Now, you can see them in reality, commercially deployed. It’s very difficult to say where we will ultimately get to,”

he says.

Wind turbines have already more than doubled their power capacity since Dong Energy constructed the first phase of Burbo Bank in 2007 with 3.7MW structures. By the mid-2020s turbines may double again and a capacity of 15MW could be spinning in Europe’s waters.

As the efficiency and power potential of each turbine increases, costs keep falling.

Read more: The Telegraph

Temperatures are now so high at the north pole that scientists are contemplating radical schemes to avoid catastrophe

Physicist Steven Desch has come up with a novel solution to the problems that now beset the Arctic. He and a team of colleagues from Arizona State University want to replenish the region’s shrinking sea ice – by building 10 million wind-powered pumps over the Arctic ice cap. In winter, these would be used to pump water to the surface of the ice where it would freeze, thickening the cap.

The pumps could add an extra metre of sea ice to the Arctic’s current layer, Desch argues. The current cap rarely exceeds 2-3 metres in thickness and is being eroded constantly as the planet succumbs to climate change.

“Thicker ice would mean longer-lasting ice. In turn, that would mean the danger of all sea ice disappearing from the Arctic in summer would be reduced significantly,” Desch told the Observer.

Desch and his team have put forward the scheme in a paper that has just been published in Earth’s Future, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, and have worked out a price tag for the project: $500bn (£400bn).

It is an astonishing sum. However, it is the kind of outlay that may become necessary if we want to halt the calamity that faces the Arctic, says Desch, who, like many other scientists, has become alarmed at temperature change in the region. They say that it is now warming twice as fast as their climate models predicted only a few years ago and argue that the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming will be insufficient to prevent the region’s sea ice disappearing completely in summer, possibly by 2030.

“Our only strategy at present seems to be to tell people to stop burning fossil fuels,” says Desch. “It’s a good idea but it is going to need a lot more than that to stop the Arctic’s sea ice from disappearing.”

The loss of the Arctic’s summer sea ice cover would disrupt life in the region, endanger many of its species, from Arctic cod to polar bears, and destroy a pristine habitat. It would also trigger further warming of the planet by removing ice that reflects solar radiation back into space, disrupt weather patterns across the northern hemisphere and melt permafrost, releasing more carbon gases into the atmosphere.

Read more: The Guardian