Today, Ørsted’s Hornsea One offshore windfarm celebrates 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 407km2. 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.
FACTS ABOUT HORNSEA ONE
- Will be the world’s largest offshore wind farm and the first ever to be built over 1 gigawatt (1GW)
- It will be capable of powering well over one million UK homes
- One rotation of a blade, which takes around 6 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
- Not just marginally bigger – this project is a step change in size, nearly double the current world’s largest offshore wind farm, Walney Extension
- It will span an area of 407 square km (58,000 times the size of Blundell Park, home to Grimsby Town FC)
- 174 Siemens Gamesa 7MW turbines, with the majority of blades manufactured in Hull
- The turbines are more than 190m tall from sea level to blade tip, over double the height of Grimsby dock tower
- A single blade is a massive 75m (246ft), as big as an Airbus 380 total wingspan, and weighs 26 tonnes. You could fit an elephant in the root of the blade.
- The blades are hand crafted in Hull and each set of three picked for the closest match in characteristics since they are handmade, to avoid any being out of balance
- Three 400MW offshore substations will convert to high voltage the clean electricity from the medium voltage cables connected to each wind turbine
- 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. It weighs around the same as 650 elephants (or 2500 cars!)
- Longest ever AC offshore wind export cable system now installed, total length of 467 km, around the same distance from London to Newcastle! Manufacture and installation completed months ahead of schedule.
- The control system manages data from 30,000 separate connection points to the equipment of the wind farm!
ABOUT Ørsted
The Ørsted vision is a world that runs entirely on green energy. Ørsted develops, constructs and operates offshore wind farms, bioenergy plants and innovative waste-to-energy solutions and provides smart energy products to its customers. Headquartered in Denmark, Ørsted employs 5,600 people, including over 900 in the UK. Ørsted’s shares are listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen (Orsted). In 2017, the group’s revenue was DKK 59.5 billion (EUR 8.0 billion). For more information on Ørsted, visit orsted.co.uk or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter.
