Could artificial islands be future of offshore wind?
From power-technology.com
At this year’s North Sea Energy Forum, Dutch energy company TenneT TSO BV, Danish Energinet.dk and Germany’s TenneT TSO GmbH signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to advance plans for a North Sea Power Hub.
The project, conceived by TenneT, will see 100GW of wind power capacity installed in the North Sea in a daisy chain of linked turbines. These would connect to a hub, being an artificial island created specifically for running and managing the turbines and their output. Energy generated from the island would be supplied through subsea cables to Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.
This will be one of the first projects to make use of a political agreement made on 6 June 2016 by the North Sea region’s countries of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, to strengthen energy cooperation. It’s hoped that collaboration will help with energy infrastructure, maximising space and promotion of large-scale wind power.