Offshore future for UK windfarms

Onshore windfarms may have little future in the UK as turbine companies fear local opposition and laborious planning processes.

The difficulty is forcing some traditionally onshore wind-turbine companies to consider offshore installations as their entryway into the UK wind-energy market.

One of the first to demonstrate this is Clipper Windpower’s subsidiary Clipper Windpower Marine, which was recently awarded a £4.4m government grant to build one of the world’s largest wind turbines for offshore.

While Clipper has a base in London, this will be its first wind-turbine installation in the UK. It will also be the company’s first offshore installation. Most of Clipper’s turbine installations are across the wide open spaces of the US.

Charlotte Kirkham, a spokesperson for Clipper in the UK, said: ‘The UK market, in Clipper’s view, is not suitable for a mass-scale onshore windfarm. The reason for that is contentious planning issues.’

Kirkham added that the US is a much easier market for onshore windfarms. She said: ‘The US has vast quantities of open space where nobody lives. You can have a couple-of-thousand-megawatt farm and it doesn’t affect anybody. Whereas in the UK, wherever you put it there are planning issues. You need to scale with these things and the UK has all the coastline it needs.’