Dept. of Irony

Not half a country’s worth arent planned, and they’re high maintenance. Realistically there’s two options long term, coal or nuclear unless someone cracks nuclear fusion

The plan is to produce 35-45% of our electricity from windpower by 2020.

Here’s a link to the Crown Estate’s info on Round 3 proposals, which would be for many far-offshore windfarms producing up to 25GW of electricity – to add to the 8GW that the Round 1 and Round 2 windfarms will produce when they are completed. That would come to 33GW. Britain’s total electricty generating capacity at the moment is about 75GW, although output is usually around 40GW, rising to a maximum of 60GW in winter.
Hurry now if you want to tender for a contract!!!
see:- http://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/round3

The cost of linking all these new windfarms to the grid with undersea cables is estimated at £10 billion on top of the cost of purchasing and installing the wind turbines.

Building 12 new nuclear power stations, as is being considered, would cost up to £30 billion. The decommissioning costs of existing nuclear power stations is estimated at £73 billion – but we’re stuck with that.

Fusion was cracked ages ago. It’s known as the hydrogen bomb!!!

But seriously, it looks like there’s enough in the idea of controlled fusion to make serious continuing research worthwhile.

It’s all planned, so the chances are it will happen. It’s at least as likely as the proposed 10-12 new nuclear power stations being built. I’m sure maintenance won’t be cheap, but there’s no cost of mining and transporting the fuel, as with coal. If this is going to be a new industry, ongoing maintenence costs is part and parcel of it, as with most other industries. A lot of the offshore engineering skills from the North Sea oil and gas industry are transferable to offshore wind turbine maintenance, and as the the oil and gas declines, the windfarms could provide employment for displaced workers.

Fifty years ago, who would have believed that we’d be extracting oil and gas from under bed of the North Sea with huge drilling rigs and that Britain’s entire gas network would be converted from coal-gas to natural gas over a period of a few years during the 1970s? The whole idea would have been ridiculed by most people….e,g, “But, my good fellow, even if there is any oil or gas beneath the North Sea, how the blue blazes would you extract it and transport it to the land?”

The offshore turbines do not need islands, each one is individually installed on a pedestal fixed to the sea-bed. See pic of the existing offshore windfarm off the Norfolk coast. It seems there are 3 methods of installing the pedestal – a single large pile driven into the seabed, 3 smaller piles supporting a tripod or ‘gravity’, where the pedestal is embedded in a very large block of concrete that rests on the sea bed. The Dogger Bank, where many of the large offshore windfarms are proposed, has a sea depth varying between 15 and 36 metres – shallow in terms of underwater construction.

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00062/windfarm_62569s.jpg

And here is a map of the grand masterplan:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00347/map_347887a.jpg
The big orange areas show where the Round 3 windfarms are planned to be, but they won’t fill the entire areas!