Wind turbines and their role in the green energy revolution

Most people have no idea just how much wind is contributing to keeping the lights on! The physical scale of today’s wind turbines is mind boggling. During the past 30 years wind power has seen an explosion in the size of turbines and, until fairly recently when China overtook us, the UK was the world leader in offshore wind installed capacity.

And wind could do so much more - but an infrastructure designed for transmitting and distributing electricity from centralised coal-fired, nuclear, and gas-fired power stations is not well-suited to the renewable age, where electricity is generated in distributed locations.  

Ongoing work to modify and reinforce the electricity grid is one of the major challenges for the switch to renewable electricity generation. 

The UK’s first two 2MW offshore wind turbines were installed at Blyth in Northumberland in 2000. These have since been decommissioned but this seabed area now has five huge 8MW turbines generating 40 megawatts of power between them, with more planned. 

Farther offshore, the 3.6GW Dogger Bank Wind farm, located more than 130km off the North East coast of England will eventually power up to 6 million homes when fully constructed. 

As the UK undergoes a rapid transition to renewables many traditional oil and gas energy companies have rebranded to reflect that they now see themselves as green energy providers. Wind turbine business costs are falling, but many companies struggle to make money, as they are still geared up for the oil and gas sector and need support to transition. 

Siemens recently made a major investment in a wind turbine manufacturing and assembly plant in Hull, while several Tier 1 manufacturers have made significant inward investments into the North East. This region has world class wind turbine test and evaluation facilities at the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult in Blyth. Here, turbine components are put through punishing stress testing to simulate offshore conditions.  

ORE Catapult built an extension onto their blade test facility to accommodate the monster blades of the GE Halliade-X turbine, which are now being installed at Dogger Bank. Each blade is the length of two spans of the Gateshead Angel and further expansion of the facilities is planned. 

The government has set a target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030 which will be very challenging to achieve. And the next innovation is floating wind turbines, but these require huge port infrastructure investments, and many competing designs are now being trialled. 

Professor Hogg's talk will address the state of the art in wind turbine technology, and look forward to what is on the horizon. The main talk will be precedded by a short introductory talk about the Dogger Bank Wind Farm O&M base, located at the Port of Tyne, and presented by Tom Nightingale of Equinor.

After the main talk, there will be a free coach tour around the Port of Tyne, where delegates will get the chance to see the amazing port facilities now being used for Offshore Wind Farm Construction Marshalling and Operations and Maintenance work.