Expansion plans at one of the world's largest offshore windfarms have come to a sudden halt, with the owners blaming concerns about migrating birds for the interruption.
The London Array will not proceed to its planned second stage, meaning it will be about a third smaller than originally proposed. The windfarm's power output will be about 630MW instead of the more than 1GW that had been the target for more than five years.
The news is the latest in a series of blows to the UK's renewables industry, which include the decision by the German company RWE npower to drastically scale back its UK ambitions.
Mike O'Hare, general manager of the consortium behind the London Array, which is in the Thames estuary, said it would take until 2017 to know whether additional turbines at the farm would affect the habitat of red-throated divers. That made the construction of additional turbines unfeasible, the consortium decided.
He said: "In the absence of any certainty that phase two would be able to go ahead, our shareholders have decided to surrender the Crown Estate agreement for lease on the site, terminate the grid connection option and concentrate on other development projects in their individual portfolios."
The windfarm, which was opened officially by David Cameron in July, has 175 turbines and occupies around 40 square miles in the Thames Estuary north of Ramsgate. It has enough capacity to power two thirds of the homes in Kent.An "interruption" suggests that the project will get back on track. Unlikely.
The big, big story line: this was published back on February 19, 2014. I follow the news -- and especially renewable energy news fairly closely -- and I was not aware of this "latest" development. It is interesting that US mainstream media did not report it. We get all the other news -- like a North Dakota man cited for marijuana possession as a top "trending" story but we never heard about the largest wind farm in the world being cut back significantly. Unless I missed it somehow, and that's possible, of course.
The other big story, of course, is that this comes on top of the study that has just been released suggesting that both France and the UK will run out of fossil fuel resources within five years. The UK runs out of natural gas in three years -- Hillary will just be starting her first term as president. Of course, Mr Obama won't look for ways to help one of our closest allies; he will see that LNG exports from Maryland go the way of the Keystone XL. Nowhere.
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