http://www.ck12.org Chapter 2. Numbers, Not Adjectives
Figure 10.3:Offshore wind.
For comparison, to make 48 kWh per day of nuclear power per person in the UK would require 8 million tons of
steel and 0.14 million tons of concrete. We can also compare the 60 million tons of offshore wind hardware that
we’re trying to imagine with the existing fossil-fuel hardware already sitting in and around the North Sea (figure
10.4). In 1997, 200 installations and 7000 km of pipelines in the UK waters of the North Sea contained 8 million
tons of steel and concrete. The newly built Langeled gas pipeline from Norway to Britain, which will convey gas
with a power of 25 GW (10 kWh/d/p), used another 1 million tons of steel and 1 million tons of concrete (figure
10.5).
The UK government announced on 10th December 2007 that it would permit the creation of 33 GW of offshore
wind capacity (which would deliver on average 10 GW to the UK, or 4.4 kWh per day per person), a plan branded
“pie in the sky” by some in the wind industry. Let’s run with a round figure of 4 kWh per day per person. This is one
quarter of my shallow 16 kWh per day per person. To obtain this average power requires roughly 10000 “3 MW”
wind turbines like those in figure 10.1. (They have a capacity of “3 MW” but on average they deliver 1 MW. I pop
quotes round “3 MW” to indicate that this is a capacity, a peak power.)
What would this “33 GW”’ of power cost to erect? Well, the “90 MW” Kentish Flats farm cost £105 million, so “33