Today, with the installation of turbine number 76, at the Borkum Riffgrund 1 Offshore Wind Farm in Germany, DONG Energy reaches a total of 3,000MW of installed offshore wind capacity.
The total capacity of 3,000MW – of which approximately half is installed in the UK – can supply enough electricity to cover the consumption of more than 7 million Europeans.
In 1991, DONG Energy constructed the world’s first offshore wind farm in the waters off the coast of Vindeby located on the island of Lolland in Denmark with a total capacity of 5MW.
The first large-scale offshore wind farms, the 160MW offshore wind farm Horns Rev 1 and Nysted Offshore Wind Farm with a capacity of 165.6MW, were constructed by DONG Energy in 2002 and 2003 respectively.
Ole Kjems Sørensen , Vice President in DONG Energy, said: “Since we constructed the first two large-scale offshore wind farms in 2002 and 2003, the industry has taken several technological leaps forward. Both the turbine capacity as well as the overall scale of the wind farms we are constructing today are three to four times larger than that of those projects we constructed in 2002 and 2003.”
Sørensen continued: “ In 2012 we announced our target to construct 6,500MW offshore wind power by the end of 2020. In other words, over the next five years, we will construct more offshore wind power capacity than we have constructed in total over the past 15 years.”
“This target is both ambitious and challenging, but we’re building on our extensive experience and, every day, the highly skilled and committed employees at DONG Energy are taking another small step to ensure that we will reach our target.”
DONG Energy is currently constructing five offshore wind farms: Westermost Rough and the Burbo Bank Extension in the UK and Borkum Riffgrund 1 and Gode Wind 1+2 in Germany.