- With the completion of Viking Wind Farm, the UK’s combined onshore and offshore wind capacity is now capable of powering over 26 million homes.
- The capacity landmark was reached today with the official opening of SSE Renewables’ newly completed 443MW Viking Wind Farm.
With the completion of Viking Wind Farm, the UK’s combined onshore and offshore wind capacity is now capable of powering over 26 million homes, according to RenewableUK
The UK’s combined onshore and offshore wind power capacity has passed the 30GW mark, thanks to opening a major new 106-turbine project on the Shetland Islands on August 29.
Trade body RenewableUK recently confirmed that total electricity generation capacity from the UK’s onshore and offshore turbines now stands at 30,299MW, which it said was enough to power more than 26 million average homes. The UK’s fleet of wind farms can now avoid over 35 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year from fossil fuel generation.
The capacity landmark was reached thanks to the official opening today of SSE Renewables’ newly completed 443MW Viking Wind Farm on the Shetland Islands, which has been developing for 15 years. According to SSE Renewables, the £1.2bn project is expected to power more than 400,000 average households a year.
It comes 26 years after the UK’s first commercial onshore wind farm came online at Delabole in Cornwall in 1991, followed almost a decade later by the country’s first-ever offshore wind project off the coast of Blyth in the northeast of England.
The development of UK wind capacity initially climbed slowly to 1GW by 2005 before reaching 5GW in 2010 and then expanding rapidly to reach 10GW in 2013 and 15GW in early 2017. RenewableUK said that the total wind power capacity doubled in just seven years to reach today’s 30GW milestone.
“It took 26 years to install the first 15GW of wind energy in the UK, so to double that to 30GW in just seven years represents a tremendous success for the industry,” said Ana Musat, RenewableUK’s executive director of policy and engagement.
“As the latest record-breaking figures from the government show, wind is the backbone of our future energy system and a key driver of our transition from expensive and volatile fossil fuels to a clean energy superpower.
“Our research also shows doubling the UK’s onshore wind capacity by the end of the decade would boost the economy by £45bn and create 27,000 jobs, whilst moving to an electricity system dominated by offshore wind by 2035 would leave consumers around £68 a year better off.”
The milestone takes the UK another small step towards the Labour government’s ambitions to double onshore wind capacity and quadruple offshore wind capacity by 2030, which would take the former from around 15GW today to around 60GW by the end of the decade and the latter from 15GW to 60GW by 2030.