The UK government announced a £75bn programme today to build thousands of offshore wind turbines that will kickstart the next phase of renewable power generation in Britain.

The Crown Estate has today announced the successful bidders for each of the nine Round 3 offshore wind zones within UK waters which would generate at least 25GW of electricity.

The expansion of electricity generation from offshore wind represents a massive long term investment opportunity which has the potential to generate thousands of jobs in the UK as well as securing a marine renewable electricity source.

Round 3 offshore wind energy generation aims to deliver a quarter of the UK’s total electricity needs by 2020.

The UK has the biggest wind resource in Europe – some estimates put the UK’s share at one-third of the continent’s total.

According to Greenpeace, Britain already leads the world in the deployment of offshore wind and has more projects installed, in planning or in construction than any other country. Almost 700MW of offshore turbines are already installed across nine projects, with around another 1.2GW under construction and a further 3.5GW in planning stages. By comparison, a large coal-fired power station generates about 1GW of electricity.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Climate Change, Enviroment, Renewable Energy, UK Gov, Windfarms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.