Dong Energy to build world’s biggest wind farm off UK coast

The 660MW Walney Extension Offshore Wind Farm, to be located in the Irish Sea, approximately 19 km off the west coast of Britain, will be the biggest offshore wind farm in the world when it is expected to be fully commissioned in 2018, surpassing the 630MW London Array Offshore Wind Farm which was commissioned in 2014 by DONG Energy and its partners.

The wind farm will be constructed and operated under the UK’s EMR FID-enabling regime with a fixed price for the first 15 years of production, the company said in a press release.

“Walney Extension will deliver clean electricity to more than 460,000 UK homes and I’m very pleased that we can now start construction of what will be the world’s biggest offshore wind farm when completed,” said Samuel Leupold, executive vice president at DONG Energy.

“Building this offshore wind farm will bring us significantly closer to realizing our strategy of having 6.5GW of installed capacity online by 2020,” Leupold said.

According to the company, the final investment decision has been made after securing all necessary consents from authorities, completing site assessments and having signed the majority of the contracts for supply and installation to build the project.

DONG Energy has decided to apply two different turbines — 40 8MW turbines from MHI Vestas Offshore Wind and 47 Siemens 7MW offshore turbines.

Headquartered in Denmark, DONG Energy is engaged in exploring and producing oil and gas, developing, constructing and operating offshore wind farms and power stations, and providing energy to residential and business customers. Group revenue was 67 billion Danish kroner (9.0 billion euros) in 2014.