Danish utility and oil firm DONG Energy is laid claim to being the first company worldwide to have installed 1000 offshore wind turbines.
Its offshore wind turbine number 1000 was commissioned at the German offshore wind farm Gode Wind 2.
The milestone comes shortly after DONG installed, in September this year, the first 8 MW offshore turbines at Burbo Bank Extension.
Anders Lindberg, Senior Vice President responsible for the construction of offshore wind farms at DONG Energy, said: "In the space of only a few years, offshore wind has evolved from being a niche technology to being recognized as a reliable and clean energy source supplying power on utility scale and playing an important role in the green transformation of the energy sector. With 1000 offshore wind turbines, we have a unique level of experience of constructing and operating 'power plants' at sea, and this is crucial to ensuring that we can continue to reduce the costs of green electricity from offshore wind."
From 2016 to 2020, DONG Energy is set to build more offshore wind capacity than it built in the preceding 25 years. And today's wind turbines deliver almost twice as much energy as the first offshore wind farm, it says.
Developments have moved forward at a rapid pace since the first Danish offshore wind turbine with a capacity of 0.45MW started producing power 25 years ago at the Vindeby offshore wind farm. Now, the largest wind turbines in the market – with a rotor span of 164m and a capacity of 8MW – can produce almost twice as much energy as all 11 of the small wind turbines that make up Vindeby. Just one rotation of the largest wind turbines produces electricity to cover one household's power consumption over 29 hours.
At the end of 2015, DONG Energy had installed offshore wind farms with a total capacity of 3 GW. And there is more in the pipeline: towards 2020, DONG Energy is building a number of large offshore wind farms in the UK and Germany that will increase capacity to 6.7 GW, equalling the electricity consumption of 17 million Europeans.
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