100th offshore wind turbine installed at Hornsea One

Ørsted is well on its way to building the world’s largest offshore wind farm as the 100th wind turbine has just been installed at the Hornsea One site. Once fully online, the site will generate enough to power well over one million homes with clean, renewable electricity.

The company continues to work towards its aim of creating a world that runs entirely on green energy and with turbine installation expected to finish late summer, it expects Hornsea One to be fully commissioned in 2020.

Quick Facts:

• One rotation of a blade, which takes around 6 seconds, can power a home for over 24 hours.
• At 120km from shore, it’s also the furthest from shore an offshore wind farm has ever been built
• Not just marginally bigger – this project is a step change in size, nearly double the current world’s largest offshore wind farm, Walney Extension
• It will span an area of 407 square km (58,000 times the size of Blundell Park, home to Grimsby Town FC)
• 174 Siemens Gamesa 7MW turbines, with the majority of blades manufactured in Hull
• The turbines are more than 190m tall from sea level to blade tip, over double the height of Grimsby dock tower
• A single blade is a massive 75m (246ft), as big as an Airbus 380 total wingspan, and weighs 26 tonnes.
• You could fit an elephant in the root of the blade.
• The blades are hand crafted in Hull and each set of three picked for the closest match in characteristics since they are handmade, to avoid any being out of balance.
• Three 400MW offshore substations will convert to high voltage the clean electricity from the medium voltage cables connected to each wind turbine
• The electricity is then transmitted via the world’s first offshore Reactive Compensation Station, which is around half way between the site and the shore, to the National Grid. It weighs around the same as 650 elephants (or 2500 cars!)
• Longest ever AC offshore wind export cable system now installed, total length of 467 km, around the same distance from London to Newcastle! Manufacture and installation completed months ahead of schedule.
• The control system manages data from 30,000 separate connection points to the equipment of the wind farm.
• Each turbine has a generator with extremely strong magnets, and the force of wind on the blades causes the rotation and produces clean electricity in the conductors through electromagnetism.

Image owned by Ørsted

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