Several European countries are working together to create an artificial island that will provide electricity to their countries; the North Sea Wind Power Hub will provide both solar and wind energy!

in #sustainability7 years ago

The plans for the North Sea Wind Power Hub was unveiled in March 2017, and aims at creating an artificial island in the middle of the North Sea. This island will function for one purpose; to provide clean, renewable energy to the countries that cooperate in building it.

The background for creating this artificial island is the Paris Agreement from 2015, where countries agreed to move towards more renewable energy sources in order to reduce the effect of global climate change.


An artist sketch of what the island could look like.

The plans for the North Sea Wind Power Hub

The first island to be created will have an area of 6 square kilometers, so it will not be a very big island. It will however house multiple thousand off-shore wind turbines that will be connected to the island, which will increase its electricity uptake by a lot. The island will also house a dock and an airport to get workers back and forth.

The island will most likely be connected to France, Denmark, Norway, England and Germany, but hopes to provide even more countries with clean energy. At maximum capacity the project will be able to deliver electricity to 70 million users!

More artificial islands

Once the first island is fully operational, the project wants to create one or two more island to get even more renewable energy to these European countries. However, there are many challenges to be solved before even the first island is ready to be built, so don’t expect all three of them finished anytime soon. The estimations for the first island is in 2050, so we still need to wait a long while before this becomes reality.

The price for this project is estimated to cost a stunning $2,000,000,000 (2 billion dollars), and that is only for the first island. Several big companies such as TenneT of both the Netherlands and Germany, and Energinet from Denmark are backing the project, so they might even have the capital needed to make this a reality. They also hope to get more companies interested in investing into the project, and it might just be possible considering the fact that everyone is looking for ways to get more renewable energy on the market these days.

I find this project very ambitious, and I really hope they manage to create this artificial island. We sorely need more renewable energy, and this will be a good step towards achieving that in these countries. Thanks for reading!

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Sounds ambitious, should work

It's interesting to compare approaches for power generation -- super-large, centralized operations that have efficiencies of scale, but are vulnerable to disruption versus less-efficient decentralized approaches that are less vulnerable to total disruption.

it is a large project let us see how successful it will be.

Lol that is amazing. Europe consumes a lot of energy, solar and wind is of great necessity. Probably Germany will dominate the space with their technology.

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