14 DAY TRIAL // German energy group RWE Innogy has announced that a planned £4 billion (€4.77 billion /$6.46 billion) offshore wind farm set to be installed in British waters will not be built after all.
The wind farm was supposed to be erected some 10 miles (about 16 kilometers) off Devon's north coast. When completed, it would have comprised as many as 240 turbines whose combined energy generating capacity would have amounted to 1,200 megawatts.
In a press release, the energy group says that the decision to pull the plug on this green energy project was taken after extensive research showed that, for the time being, going ahead with plans to build the offshore wind farm did not make sense financially-wise.
More precisely, RWE Innogy put the blame on technical difficulties and the costs associated with them.
“This is not a decision we have taken lightly, however given the technological challenges and market conditions, now is not the right time for RWE to continue to progress with this project,” Paul Cowling, the current director of Offshore Wind at RWE Innogy, explained in a statement.
“We are very grateful for the support we have received from the many interested parties involved in helping us to develop the Atlantic Array project, however the commercial reality means that in the current market conditions, overcoming the technical challenges within The Bristol Channel Zone would be uneconomic for RWE at this time,” Paul Cowling added.
RWE Innogy says that, although it will not move forward with this project, it will nonetheless continue to install offshore wind energy capacity in areas that are less difficult to operate in.
Thus, the energy group expects that, by next year, it will have finished work on another offshore wind farm, i.e. Gwynt-Y-Mor, whose energy generating capacity will be one of 576 MW.
This installation, now under construction off the coast of North Whales, will be the world's second largest of its kind.
According to Click Green, environmentalists believe that the government's failure to properly support the renewable energy industry is behind RWE Innogy's decision not to build the Atlantic Array wind farm.
“The Government must urgently delve into the reasons why the plug has been pulled on this key wind project, including asking searching questions of its own policies and anti-green rhetoric,” said Andrew Pendleton with Friends of the Earth.
“The UK has some of the finest offshore clean energy resources in the world - we must harness it to wean the nation off dirty and increasingly costly fossil fuels,” he added.