GREGG BRADEN GREGG BRADEN - Earthstar

Britain's Goal To Build Enough Wind Turbines To Power all its HomesEarth Star Up FrontBritain unveiled plans last month to generate enoughelectricity through off-shore wind farms to powerevery home in the country by 2020, increasing produc-tionmore than sixty-fold and changing the look of itscoastlines.Britain’s wind-swept coasts and shallow waters are idealfor offshore turbines, but wind generated power currentlyaccounts for less than two percent of its energy generation.Business secretary John Hutton said the governmentplanned to reach the target through a fourfold increase in theamount of space off Britain’s shores allocated for wind farms.The move would change Britain’s coasts, Huttonacknowledged, but said the need for energy self-sufficiencyleft the country no choice. He said the plans would depend onenvironmental impact studies.“But if we could manage to achieve this, by 2020 enough electricitycould be generated off our shores to power the equivalentof all of the UK’s homes,” Hutton said in a statement.The British Wind Energy Association, a trade body thatrepresents the country’s wind and marine energy industries,welcomed plans for more offshore wind farm sites, but it saidit would be difficult to raise Britain’s wind power productionfrom half a gigawatt currently to 33 gigawatts by 2020—theequivalent of the energy now consumed by every Britishhome. Eight gigawatts’ worth of wind generation projects arealready planned, but the group said the limited supply of turbinesmeant the amount of wind energy produced. by 2020would likely be closer to 20 gigawatts.“We’d really be struggling from a ‘Where can we get theturbines?’” point of view, the association’s economics directorGordon Edge said.Environmental campaigners welcomed the plan, but somenoted that wind generated power is expensive. Wind powergeneratedelectricity is currently costlier to generate than itscoal- or gas-generated counterpart.Massive new offshore wind farms, such as the 1 GigawattLondon project planned for the Thames estuary in the country’ssoutheast, are due to go online by 2014. According to the BWEA,the country is on track to overtake Denmark as the world’s largestgenerator of offshore wind power next year. —UJNewswww.earthstarmag.comFEBRUARY / MARCH 2008 EARTH STAR 9