The Ørsted’s Hornsea One offshore windfarm has celebrated the milestone of installing half of its 174 offshore wind turbines.
The site, due to become the world’s largest once fully online, saw the first turbine being installed in February 2019 and now just four months on, the halfway installation point has been reached.
With just 87 more turbines due to be commissioned, the site is due to reach full completion in the first quarter of 2020.
Spanning across an area of 407 square kilometres, the windfarm will power well over one million homes in the UK when fully operational. The site will consist of 174 Siemens Gamesa 7MW turbines and will be nearly double the size of the current world’s largest, Walney Extension.
It will be the first offshore windfarm to be built over 1 gigawatt (1GW) and will be capable of powering well over one million UK homes. One rotation of a blade, which takes around six seconds, can power a home for over 24 hours.
At 120km from shore, it’s also the furthest from shore an offshore wind farm has ever been built. It will span an area of 407 square kilometres, and the turbines are more than 190m tall from sea level to blade tip.
Three 400MW offshore substations will convert the clean electricity from the medium voltage cables connected to each wind turbine to high voltage. The electricity is then transmitted via the world’s first offshore reactive compensation station, which is around half way between the site and the shore, to the National Grid.
The longest ever AC offshore wind export cable system has now been installed, with a total length of 467km.
