Wind energy – UK
Hecate Independent Power, a company chaired by Sir Tony Baldry, a former minister in the UK Department of Energy under Margaret Thatcher, on Friday announced plans to build a massive offshore wind project off the coast of Iceland that would, via long subsea cables, power the UK.
Hecate said that it aimed to build as much as ten gigawatts of fixed and floating turbines in the North Atlantic and a series of subsea cables to carry the power more than 600 miles to the UK grid.
According to the developer, the project, called HIP Atlantic, proposes the installation of 10GW of fixed and floating wind turbines in the North Atlantic connected to the United Kingdom by long-length, high-capacity, high-voltage direct current (HVDC) submarine power transmission cables.
HIP is a company owned by U.S. renewable energy firm Hecate Energy LLC, and UK-based Independent Power Corporation PLC, a developer of conventional power plants.
The company said it had lodged four connection applications with National Grid Company for an initial 4,000 MW of grid connections to the United Kingdom’s 400 kV electricity transmission system across four connection sites.
According to HIP, HIP Atlantic’s initial 2,000 MW of generation capacity, targeted to be off the southern and eastern coasts of Iceland, is expected to be commissioned in early 2025 to coincide with the United Kingdom’s de-commissioning of its last coal-fired power plants and the last of its original generation of commercial nuclear power plants.
“Crucially, the HIP Atlantic HVDC transmission cables will never connect to the Icelandic transmission system: the high availability wind capacity will be solely connected to the United Kingdom, dispatched by National Grid,” HIP said .
HIP’s proposed offshore wind pods in the North Atlantic will all be installed in a different meteorological catchment area than existing North Sea and Irish Sea wind farms, allowing HIP renewable energy to be supplied when existing British wind farms are becalmed.
“This diversity of wind source provides a geographical portfolio effect to protect the UK transmission grid from too much offshore wind capacity installed in just one region,” the company said.