Dong Energy to build the world’s biggest offshore wind farm

Dong Energy will construct the 660MW Walney Extension Offshore Wind Farm, located in the Irish Sea, approximately 19 km off the west coast of Britain.

Walney Extension is expected to be fully commissioned in 2018, at which time it will be the biggest offshore wind farm in the world, surpassing the 630MW London Array Offshore Wind Farm which was commissioned in 2014 by Dong Energy and its partners. The wind farm will be constructed and operated under the UK’s EMR FID-enabling regime with a fixed price for the first 15 years of
production.

Samuel Leupold, Executive Vice President at DONG Energy, said: “Walney Extension will deliver clean electricity to more than 460,000 UK homes and I’m very pleased that we can now start construction of what will be the world’s biggest offshore wind farm when completed. Building this offshore wind
farm will bring us significantly closer to realising our strategy of having 6.5GW of installed capacity online by 2020.”

Dong Energy has decided to apply two different turbines: 40 8MW turbines from MHI Vestas Offshore Wind and 47 Siemens 7MW offshore turbines.

Currently DONG Energy is constructing 2,080MW in the UK and Germany. When these projects, including Walney Extension, are completed, DONG Energy has built a total of 5,089MW, corresponding to the annual consumption of electricity of more than 12.5 million Europeans.