LONDON: The London Array Consortium on Wednesday marked Global Wind Day, an annual worldwide event that celebrates the potential of wind as a viable source of clean energy, by announcing progress on the 630MW first phase of London Array, the offshore wind farm that is under construction in the Thames Estuary. The 1GW project, a joint venture between DONG Energy (50%), E.ON (30%) and Masdar (20%), is scheduled to become the largest offshore wind farm in the world, supplying clean electricity to over 750,000 homes in the United Kingdom when fully complete. Located around 20km from the Kent and Essex coasts, London Array will eventually cover an area of 245 square kilometers on the Thames Estuary, and will be connected by undersea cables to a new onshore substation currently being built at Cleve Hill on the North Kent coast. Giving details of the offshore construction on the first 630MW phase of the project, London Array said twenty of the planned 177 monopile foundations (175 wind turbines and two offshore substations) have been installed to date. The foundation work commenced in March 2011 and Phase One of the project is scheduled for completion by the end of 2012. The wind turbines for Phase One will each have a capacity of 3.6MW, and a total height of around 147 meters. The turbines will start generating electricity when wind speeds reach 3 meters per second (m/s) or around 7mph. The turbines will achieve full power from 13m/s (around 29mph). For safety reasons, the turbines will start shutting down if the wind speed becomes greater than 25m/s – equivalent to a force 9 gale. In keeping with the project's commitment to the preservation of the marine ecosystem, vessels have been deployed for marine mammal observation duties, prior to and during the piling operations to ensure the safety of all marine life. BM
