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Offshore Wind

See the future of UK Offshore Wind

Many people would like to know what a future would look like where a large proportion of the UK's power comes from offshore wind. How much space would be needed? The map below is a visualization tool for offshore wind around the UK.

The key below shows 4 example sizes of offshore wind projects
offshore wind project areas

The smallest one at the top represent the current 'Round One' wind farms, two of which are already operating. The other larger squares represent typical sizes for future planned projects. On the map below the bottom 3 squares can be picked up with your mouse and moved to any location around the UK. The program will then add the project capacity to the overall offshore wind total. If you wish to remove a wind farm, just drag it to the grey box on the bottom right and let go, it will be removed from the total and the map. To cover more possibilities the capacity factor can be varied to account for a more or less windy future. Just select it with your mouse and type in a new figure.

The squares on the map aren't full of wind turbines. To see how spaced out they are, have a look at this picture of Horns Rev, a 160 MW wind farm in Denmark. This is a little smaller than the green square in the key.

Note: International boundaries and water depth are a close guide but only for illustration.

Capacity factor is the average power output for a wind farm compared to the maximum power the generator can produce when it is very windy. This is normally about 0.30 in the UK but it's more windy at sea, so this model starts off with 0.33. Try putting in numbers between 0.3 and 0.4 and see what difference it makes to the contribution offshore wind makes to UK electricity.