Wind Energy | Future of Renewable Energy | Full Documentary

Fishtail is a prime location due to the proximity of the sea, there are very good

wind

s in this part of Denmark when you have a 75 meter long blade, the tip of the blade runs at 200 kilometers per hour, the current design of the blade is Much more comparable to, say, a formula one team or aerospace design, every time we do something new we really push the boundaries of what's possible. A global industrial revolution is underway. Yes, we have a technological challenge for our environment for the well-being of the population. planet for civilization powered by passionate and dedicated people trying to shape a new world.

I do it because I look at my children and, honestly, I am convinced that this is how you achieve a cleaner world. There is a way forward that is not to burn fossil fuels from our funnels. For a greener world, this

wind

farm is producing more hours of

energy

on the grid than all the wind farms in the UK and probably the world. What we have done in the past is not going to solve these challenges. We need to find new ways and I. I believe the only way to do this is to boldly step forward and implement technology together.

They are pushing engineering to the limit to create extraordinary machines that can protect our planet for the

future

. The world is entering a post-carbon era and one of the most visible. One sign of this is the wind turbine, whether they like it or not, these gentle giants are slowly becoming part of the modern landscape. Today there are more than 300,000 turbines around the world generating 600 gigawatts of electricity, enough to continuously power almost 400 million homes and now Hungary for More clean

energy

countries are eyeing their shores, but building wind farms At sea it is much more difficult than on land.

The forces on the steel are so great that the turbine will destroy itself. We have had wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour. and waves of up to eight meters, but the reward could change the world. Unlimited amounts of clean energy could replace fossil fuels forever. These turbines will produce enough clean energy to power 630,000 homes. Offshore wind energy has a lot of potential for the electricity system in the

future

. Can we really make all of the world's oceans available for wind energy? That was the challenge as engineers are racing to design taller turbines, larger wind farms and structures that capture wind over deeper oceans because if they can harness even a fraction of the ocean wind, they could supply it. everyone with electricity the only way to harness wind energy that we know of is with turbines the wind is simply air that moves from one place to another and when things move they have energy but the turbines cannot capture it all because as energy is taken from the wind, the air slows down if a turbine took 100 of the energy, the air would stop just after the blades and that stationary layer of air would block more wind from passing through the rotor.

In fact, scientists have found that the most energy that is theoretically possible to capture is 59.3 percent, known as the betting limit, so engineers want to get as close to that limit as possible and the The best way we currently know is to use aerodynamic profiles like the wings of an airplane with this teardrop. The shape creates lift, which is a force perpendicular to the movement of air through it. Some wind turbines can now capture almost 50 percent of the wind's energy and are still improving. The blades are vulnerable to storms, so when the wind blows too hard, the pitch changes. to let it pass harmlessly in good condition the rotor turns a shaft inside the nacelle the hub at the top of the tower that houses the generator here a ring of magnets rotates around a metal coil that generates electricity these modern Wind turbines were well established by the end of the 20th century, they were still small and expensive, but the problem of burning fossil fuels was gaining attention.

People began to look for alternative means of producing energy, not only because of the climate but because fossil fuels were finite and therefore the energy sector. 20 years ago I was really starting to understand this concept of energy transition that was completely changing the way we produce energy. Wind turbines spread rapidly, but the size of available sites was limited and they were considered by many to be a blight on the landscape that some pioneers could see. One possible solution: By building offshore wind farms, offshore, you could capture a lot more wind and produce a lot more energy, and the scale that could be achieved offshore is much greater than on land because you're not as close to towns and cities, but from the harsh conditions. at sea are daunting and many wondered whether offshore wind farms were feasible.

There were big questions about whether the technology was going to be reliable enough and survivable enough in these really hostile marine environments where, naturally, you have to put turbines to catch the wind. offshore wind and also big questions about how expensive it was Jonathan Cole, CEO of offshore window energy company Ibedrola, was determined to find a way for myself and a small team of people to come together to develop a strategy for get into offshore wind and what we could see was that if scale and industrialization could be brought to the offshore wind sector, it had huge potential.

Jonathan's vision was to create massive offshore wind farms that could replace entire fossil fuel power plants and eventually supply the world with clean wind energy, but to do that. It must reduce the high cost of offshore wind enough to compete not only with other

renewable

energy sources but also with coal and gas. In 2010, Jonathan began planning a large wind farm to demonstrate that it could be done and that the UK was the perfect place to build it. There were a number of large gas and coal plants that were going to have to close, so the UK had to effectively rebuild more than half of its energy infrastructure and of course the UK is an island with huge amounts of shallow water seabed off the coast.

The seabed of the island was very windy, so it was a really unique place in terms of the actual need for energy, but also having this incredible resource right off the coast. The proposed offshore wind farm was called East Anglia and would be much larger than any that existed at the time. Building such a colossal set posed enormous challenges for Jonathan's team. They needed turbines much more powerful than anything on the market and structures to keep them above 45 meters of turbulent water. They needed 102 of these giant turbines spread over an area of ​​300 square kilometers and we had to find a way to transmit the electricity 50 kilometers to the coast.

This huge wind farm would provide more than enough energy to replace a typical coal-fired power plant and Jonathan must achieve all this while reducing the cost we invest in teams of people. place to ensure that East Anglia was not only going to be the largest project in the world, but that it would also be the most profitable. In April 2017, in shipyards in Spain, Northern Ireland and the United Arab Emirates, hundreds of metal workers began building foundations. Called jackets, these towers hold the turbines above the water and are securely fixed by long piles driven deep into the seabed.

The structures must be extremely strong not only to support turbines weighing more than 400 tons, but they must also withstand stormy seas and absorb enormous wind loads to reduce costs Jonathan hired Charlie Jordan as project manager Charlie knew that these frames Bulky were not only expensive to manufacture but also to move, a major element of the cost is the transportation and storage of these structures. What we wanted to do is try to reduce the cost and one area of ​​innovation that allowed us to do was to review the design of the jackets. Jackets typically have four legs.

Charlie's team realized that if you removed one of them, you could fit more jackets on a barge, which would reduce the cost of transporting them, but also weaken the structure. Simply change from four legs to three legs, then the structure would be too thin because you have these additional loads that have to be transmitted through three legs instead of four, so what you have to do then is look at the design, the reinforcement of The solution lay in a neighboring shipyard that was making the piles that would ultimately anchor each leg to the seabed. Each pile is made up of 19 individual steel cans placed end to end. and weighs 120 tons, engineers calculated that making the piles about 150 millimeters wider would transfer the extra load to the seabed, making the overall structure strong enough;

After all, the massive jackets could be built with three legs, as workers assembled 845 tons of steel each immense. The tower rose steadily until it reached 65 meters in height. In Spain alone, more than a thousand people worked on the foundations for a total of one million hours to complete the structure. A final component was needed that would finally connect the jackets to the turbines. These steel rings are called The flanges have to be extremely strong and also precisely designed, but to make a steel ring strong enough to support the weight of a turbine, the components had to be forged at high temperatures and that made much more difficult to get the exact size of steel through Nature, when we heat it up and then cool it down, it has the chance to expand and contract, so it is very important that during the manufacturing process we make sure that there is precision engineering to ensure these things are designed with millimeters of forging tolerance.

For the huge rings, the team had to heat the steel to a temperature of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius, then rolled and machined the steel. The flanges must have a diameter of exactly 6,002 millimeters, but the metal shrinks when it cools, so the technicians had to do their calculations. Exactly right the first time, the team did a fantastic job making sure that when we attached the foundations to the wind turbine there were no gaps and we had a good solid connection within a year the foundations were ready to be shipped to the North Sea. As planned, the three-legged shape allowed more jackets to be stacked on the barges.

By making it with three legs, it gave us huge advantages, mainly in terms of the space it took up, for storage, transportation and then taking them out at installation. We can transport more jackets in a single trip, as some of the barges were shipped 19,000 kilometers around the southern tip of Africa. Every trip saved. Charlie had his first big cost savings and the jackets were on the way. The team could now. install the foundations in the north sea first they aligned the load piles and drove them into the seabed, then they lowered the sleeves on top to fix them to the piles the foundations were now ready for the wind turbines meanwhile the team had To build a structure called an offshore substation, this huge machine would be located in the middle of the wind farm where it could collect all the electricity generated by the surrounding turbines and send it to shore.

The offshore substation could effectively be described as the heart of offshore wind energy. Here you go. all the individual lines or they could be like the arteries where all the turbines in East Anglia are connected 1. The substation would have to increase the voltage to over 200,000 volts and then send the electricity along the seabed and underground to a Onshore substation where it will connect to the grid, high voltage allows more power to be transmitted and means less heat is lost along the way, but to handle an offshore wind farm larger than any other, the team needed to build a substation like none before. we wanted to have a wind farm that produced as much green energy as possible, a key function of that was then the design of the offshore substation, so similarly we looked to maximize the size of that offshore substation as large as we can technically make it.

In the summer of 2017, construction of the large substation was underway in Spain, as was the gigantic jacket to keep it above the water at almost 4,000 tons. It is the largest of its kind ever built, which created challenges. I think we are looking. There are possibly two vessels available in the world to be able to install a structure of this type, so, in reality, before even starting with the substation we had tobook the boat and what that meant was that we had to book the boat three years in advance for a two week slot, if the schedule fell behind and they lost their place it would cause delays and more costs so everything had to go as planned.

The first component that was sent to the English coast had to be the base of the deck, but it remained as a structure. the port of spain there was an obstacle on the way the bridge of cadiz is more than three kilometers long and 69 meters high but despite being one of the highest in europe the foundations of the barge reached even higher immediately when you left from the port We have a road bridge there under which, under normal tides, the substation wouldn't actually fit. There was only one solution to clear the bridge. The team had to reach the short low tide window exactly from a distance.

You can see this enormous structure sailing below. The road bridge with very limited clearance was undoubtedly a very exciting point of the project that was hot on its heels. The substation that broke the world record is also loaded on a barge ready to install the power plant in the heart of the wind farm. giant left Spain on a 2,000 kilometer journey around Portugal and across the English Channel to its new home in the North Sea and they arrived just in time for the giant crane ship. The installation could begin. These are huge vessels of almost 10,000 tons and these vessels themselves weigh almost 200 meters long, the substation itself, at almost 4,000 tons, is a huge structure to lift, despite the size of the crane vessel, the weight of the suspended substation would still be enough to capsize it, so to balance it, 30,000 tons of ballast were added to the ship. house three times the weight of the Eiffel Tower When you start designing the elevator, you actually not only have to organize the substation, but you also have to orient and rearrange the ballast container to support the elevator that was in the substation.

Finally, to It then had to connect to the grid in England, so an 85 kilometer long cable was laid along the seabed, then the coastal cliffs were bypassed with a tunnel to carry the power line, followed by 37 kilometers of trenches to connect with a land line. substation here electricity from the wind farm would join the national grid everything was finally ready for the turbines when the team was planning East Anglia 1 in 2010 the largest turbines installed anywhere in the world could produce 5 megawatts of power enough to

full

y charge 3,000 typical electric cars every day, but to produce cheaper electricity they needed even more powerful turbines and that meant much larger rotors which were available at the time, when we chose the wind turbine for East Anglia, a project didn't even exist.

It only existed on paper and was bigger than anything anyone had seen before in the global

renewable

energy sector. Once they placed the order, it was up to a team in Denmark to find a way to make it in Oster Ild Denmark on a windswept plain near the The North Sea is home to some of the world's largest wind turbines, a Despite being on land, these giant structures are designed to eventually be used at sea as offshore wind turbines become larger and larger. This is where they are tested in the real world, including the turbine. intended for East Anglia, although we use very detailed computer models throughout the design phase, from initial conception to detailed design, in the end it can only take us so far, we still have to test in real life.

Jepe Funkk Kierkegaard leads the blade design division of the world's largest marine turbine manufacturer, Siemens Games, in 2015 they had to guarantee that the turbine would generate as much electricity as they had promised and the margins in the wind industry are extremely tight, the worst of cases is if the turbine runs one or two percent less than we promised because that would completely change the business case for our customers and for society for the offshore wind pump, yepe's job was to design a rotor that could generate more than 50 percent more electricity to make To make it more powerful, he had to lengthen the blades from 63 meters to a phenomenal 75 meters, but that could have a big knock-on effect on the weight and cost of the blade, while the length it only increases by 25 percent if new technologies are not incorporated. the mass would increase by something like 50 so a heavy blade needs a heavy core, a heavy cell, a stronger tower all the way and that really drives costs so from an engineering perspective the real challenge is to keep this exponential mass growth under control. and keep it as small as possible.

Yes, his team had to completely redesign the blade to make it longer without being much heavier, but reducing the weight of a longer blade would make it more susceptible to damage from high winds. They decided to try a radically new approach. One of the inspirations that made us change the design came from birds, especially like the seagull, where you have a gull wing that is flexible and allows it to bend with the forces that the wind puts on it, otherwise it would break the effect you want. What I have is that when the blade bends it also twists because that is how it is discharged from the wind.

The plan was to design a blade that was incredibly flexible so that when a strong gust of wind applied a heavy load to it instead of breaking, it would bend but there is still a danger of it bending so much that it breaks. A brilliant adjustment to the design sees the blade rotate slightly away from the wind as it bends. This rotation reduces the load and prevents the blade from being damaged. That load reduction allows us to make the blade longer for basically the same mass, then they had to build the blades and test if the design worked.

Each giant leaf is handmade. First, the team places several tons of fiberglass into a huge mold to give strength to the blade at the precise angle of the fiberglass. The leaves should make the finished leaf twist. Next comes a layer of balsa wood that is rigid but also lightweight. Then we have to inject eight tons of epoxy resin so that the matrix, the glue that holds the sheet together, the sheets that we have are actually the largest one-piece task structure in the world. A series of tough tests show the radical new design bends and twists like it's supposed to, but could it generate as much power as promised?

Finally, the 75-meter blades were put into place for the first time. once the world's largest rotor here at the Ostereld test site, the meteorological masts measured the exact wind speed, so by measuring the energy generated at different wind speeds, the team was able to calculate the performance and adjust the turbine after three years, the results. They are ready and, to Yappy's delight, the turbine has performed beyond expectations by one percent, although it may not seem like much, it is actually a very significant advantage. Imagine that if you have a large wind farm with 100 turbines, you will actually get one turbine for free, the largest one.

The largest wind turbine in the world has passed its tests with flying colors. It is ready to be deployed at one of the world's largest wind farms in Great Yarmouth, England, by summer 2019. The giant components have gathered on this dock ready to build 102 wind turbines. It's been quite a journey. I have been working on this project for the last five years and it is very emotional to see it happen, to see the reality of being here on board the ship and witnessing the first loading. We are just getting to the top of the project. is eager to see this happen in reality the turbines will be among the largest and most powerful ever built each tower is as tall as a football field is long each blade would extend the entire wingspan of a Boeing 747 and the hubs known as nacelles could each We placed two London double-decker buses here in this port of Great Yarmouth.

We are putting together all the components that will make up the wind turbines. We have shovels. The 306 will be built by hand and brought here to be loaded. on the ship for installation and then we have the nacelles that are the real heart of the wind turbine that were built in Germany and then we have the towers that were manufactured throughout Europe, in Spain, in Scotland and in Denmark, all the components were They have shipped here and they will be loaded onto this ship to take them to the offshore wind farm and start building them one by one until all 102 wind turbines are built in the wind farm once they are

full

y built.

Assembled on its base, each turbine would be twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and at full power, each would provide continuous electricity to more than 6,000 homes. When this project is complete, all 102 turbines are installed and operational, they will produce enough clean energy. energy to power 630,000 homes to install and then maintain these turbines a highly trained local workforce capable of mastering the harsh conditions of the north sea will be needed in typical winter conditions survival times in the water can be as little as a few minutes, of course it is imperative that we seek to keep everyone safe.

Everyone who goes out and helps others in these environments works in challenging environments with very harsh conditions offshore wind farms. Working on the high seas is a very onerous task. They have a long commute to work in the morning. To keep the team safe, they must plan for the worst and that means immersive lifeguard training. Clouting is working with local trainees in England with a small staff. I am very passionate about the topic of caring for people and touching their lives in some positive way and everyone. return home safely if something goes wrong, God forbid, the training group simulates the wind and wave conditions that trainee technicians will face in the North Sea.

These new recruits will build and maintain wind turbines in the East Anglia area for decades. To come, I'm a bop technician apprentice, so it basically involves everything that can actually be done on a wind turbine, from maintenance and air operations, all the wind lasts my entire life, so I'll definitely be there to whatever. I can see life in a five week course where students must master new survival skills and techniques to stay safe in hostile waters, but the most important lesson is to have the right mental attitude, it's not just about informing them, but also to condition them. to activate their mojo to lift the hair on the back of their neck to use controlled aggression when something should go wrong so it's the little things that we pay a lot of attention to and we will push them hard these trainees will soon be ready to head safely to the wind farm that is rapidly taking shape off the coast as pieces of the turbine head towards their final destination.

Everything is going according to plan and within budget. The specialized vessel called a jack-up barge is designed to plant four legs firmly on the sea floor. meters below, making the barge completely stable despite the waves, then they can start building the turbines. It is crucial that the team stay up to date when you are in the offshore installation phase of the project, which is probably when you are at your highest point of sensitivity. delay because that's when you have these huge, expensive offshore wind installation vessels working in the field and we only have them there for a finite period of time before they have to move on to the next project, so it's really important that you can stay on schedule as you have seen installation vessels cost around 150,000 per day so any delay will result in high costs but the team has already installed 13 turbines and is picking up pace but as summer It turns into autumn and then into winter.

The weather is becoming increasingly windy, making lifting components more difficult. The particular challenges have to do with the blades, which are 75 meters long, in this case they are aerodynamically designed to ensure they capture the wind, so if there are gusts of wind, you know there will be gaps. most susceptible in 2019, the East Anglia Assembly 1 was prepared to face one of the stormiest winters on record. We experienced some really exceptional weather in late 2019 and early 2020, I think at one point three named storms appeared in a period of three weeks to avoid accidents, all operations were stopped when the wind was too strong, but to keep the heading, Charlie had an ace up his sleeve: we were able to introduce a second boat, so the idea was to be able to install turbines in parallel. with two boats, an increase of 100 in capacity, so the weather was good and we are in periods of suitable conditions, we were ablemaximizing installation during that period by moving quickly during good weather windows, the team continued to make progress despite disruptions on 11 July 2020.

The final turbine was connected to the UK national grid. Together, they generate 740 million watts of electricity that power more than 600,000 homes. You spend all this time putting the pieces together and seeing how they work, but you know when it comes together and all the turbines were working. operationally everything was working as it was supposed to be, you know, a fantastic achievement it really was an incredible achievement, an incredible feeling for me, but for the hundreds of people involved in this project, the project finished on time and under budget, proof that offshore wind can generate electricity. At a competitive price, with two-thirds of the Earth's surface covered by water, the rise of offshore wind seems unstoppable, but its growth is limited by one crucial factor.

So far, offshore wind has been very successful in areas where shallow water sites are abundant. but there are many parts of the world like the west coast of the united states in south america and parts of asia where they simply don't have those shallow sites and in that case some other solution can be found, studies have found that more than 95 percent Hundreds of the world's seas and oceans are too deep for jacket foundations. After all, the future of offshore wind may be limited to just a handful of coastal locations, unless the air above provides buoyancy to lift it.

Floating turbines could be placed almost anywhere. in the ocean, but would they be stable enough in a storm? Engineer Simon Moxners was brought in to discover that my role in the initial phase was to run simulations to demonstrate that the structure, the floating structure, could actually survive the worst hurricane conditions that we could foresee. out in the ocean, what we discovered when we ran those simulations was that the back and forth rolling motion, what we call the tilting of the structures, was very large, it tilted up to 20 degrees, which is quite violent, and we knew that standard The wind turbine we intended to use in our floating structure could not survive much more than 10 degrees to make the structure more stable.

The team needed to get the center of gravity as low as possible, so they tried a long cylindrical tank containing very dense ballast. They finally found a design that worked in theory, in reality we were quite inspired and as critical as a happy engineer can be, but for floating wind to be a success, Simon and his team had to prove that it would work in a wind farm. on a large scale 15 years later, after years of testing smaller scale demonstrations, part of the world's first floating wind farm was under construction in Spain and the shape had to be exactly right if we got a structure that had bumps and curves, so forces and a crack can create a leak and a leak will cause the floating structure to sink.

The finished structures measure more than 90 meters long, 14 meters wide and weigh more than 2,000 tons. The team loaded the titanic steel tanks onto ships and shipped them to the assembly site 2,000 kilometers away. In May 2017, floating substructures arrived in the Hardanger Fjord in Norway. Next, the team has to add the ballast while two tugboats hold the substructure in place. A third ship pumps water in through a hose, but water alone is not heavy enough, if you use water as ballast your center gravity simply will not be low enough and you will end up with a very flexible structure and a structure that does not It is capable of supporting a wind turbine with the great confidence of the wind generated by the water.

One end sinks 80 meters below the surface, then they add iron ore that is five times denser than water to lower the structure's center of gravity and make it more stable. Finally, each structure weighs five thousand tons of iron ore and three thousand tons of water, bringing the total weight to 12,000 tons, equivalent to 2,000 African elephants, the result is an extraordinarily stable base ready to house the first set of floating wind turbines in the world in the nearby port of stord all turbine components are being aligned the fjord is 900 meters deep and protected from inclement weather, but even here the precise maneuvers involved in building a turbine wind turbines are difficult on floating foundations.

Instead, the team first assembled the turbines on land, so they could then attach them to the floating bases in one piece. But never before has such large turbines been attempted to be raised in one go, and there are only two vessels in the world large enough to do so. That craft is extremely expensive, which means you can't mess around and mess around, you just have to do the same thing. work, put it in and it has to land in perfect position the saberm 7000 two monster cranes are needed to lift the 170 meter high turbine this maneuver has never been attempted before and will test the team to its limits, they must proceed with caution so that it takes hours to get the first turbine to its base monica pettison is the director of the assembly site at the last minute the crane stops lowering the turbine something seems to have gone wrong but despite its volume this enormous ship can move with millimeter precision its condition The modern dynamic positioning system uses 12 thrusters to keep the ship fixed in place.

After many hours, the turbine successfully connects to its floating base, a world first. I have a real detector that will have in the next few days, the other four turbines will quickly follow. These vast structures now stand a whopping 253 meters tall from top to bottom, more than three times the height of the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner, with 80 meters of which extend invisibly beneath the surface and then another world-first towing wind turbines. completely assembled across the sea with so much resistance that they can only move safely at five kilometers per hour, making the trip to Scotland last five days september 2020 the scottish town of peterhead as a claim to fame an hour away Boat from the port It is the world's only floating wind farm The turbines have been generating power for the city for three years.

We are on the Scottish Highway, which is the world's first floating offshore wind farm. Or the floating wind farm can use an area like the outskirts of Peter Head, which is very windy, as can be seen today. It shows a strong and constant wind, so you couldn't build a fixed bottom wind farm here because it's too deep, but floating is perfect from the surface. It is difficult to distinguish a floating turbine from a conventional one, the only difference is that they have a slight vertical inclination. and you can see that there, if you look closely, sonja kerrico at drebo manages the set, her job is to monitor the performance of the floating turbines that we are testing to see how well they are doing with production, but also how the hostile environment is impacting the turbines.

The wind farm was designed to withstand hurricanes and its moment of truth came sooner than anyone expected. This wind farm was put into production in October 2017 and just a few days later Hurricane Ophelia crossed and had strong winds and of course we were very worried about what would happen. What was going to happen when the storm hit, the turbines were pushed back if they tilted more than 10 degrees, the extra stress could have destroyed them when the wind speed reached 90 kilometers per hour, the rotor was shut down to protect the turbine from powerful gusts and to protect yourself. the structure from the impact of the waves the floating base carried the entire structure safely on them it was an opportunity for the turbines to demonstrate that they can also withstand these types of conditions and what happened was that the turbines were working exactly as expected Floating structures survived, but to be a success they also have to demonstrate that they can generate as much energy as conventional wind turbines.

After three years of data collection, the results speak for themselves when we decided Hive in Scotland we hoped to prove that a floating structure survived. A wind farm could produce as much energy as a traditional, fixed-bottom wind farm. What we learned was that it can indeed produce and it can even produce more because you can place it in an area with even windier conditions. This wind farm produces more hours of Meanwhile, conventional wind farms are going from strength to strength as costs continue to plummet, now that offshore wind has fallen to a price that is less than a third of what it was ago. 10 years and now making it much cheaper than producing power from gas, coal or nuclear for two months in 2020.

New offshore wind farms help Britain transition away from coal for the first time since the revolution industrial, but in addition to providing affordable low-carbon energy, the offshore wind industry is replacing fossil fuels in other ways. These industrial coastal towns were previously heavily involved in the oil and gas sector and then, over a period of 20 to 30 years, those industries began to become increasingly difficult to work in. Many of East Anglia used to work in the oil and gas sector. oil and gas wind farms have given them new careers and opportunities one of the wonderful things we could see about offshore wind is that we could really bring life back to these coastal communities we could reoccupy those ports doing engineering work for projects offshore wind energy, but it was also a great thing for the off-road wind industry because we had this skilled workforce ready and willing to come work with us and help us develop the potential of offshore wind energy that the workforce is now developing even more. even larger wind farms and turbines the latest prototype has 107 meter long blades each movement of its giant rotor will power a home for two days experts believe that by 2040 offshore wind farms have the potential to meet global demand for electricity 11 times more than offshore wind has already proven capable of producing massive amounts of clean, green, reliable and affordable energy, and these huge projects that can actually be implemented quite quickly on a massive scale create a lot of local benefits and, if we look ahead the future, 10 years, almost all areas with a coast take advantage of that coast and that is why offshore wind energy has so much potential for the electrical system in the future