U.K. Awards 6GW of Wind Leases: Two Go to Oil-Turned-Turbine Gang

The Crown Estate, the body in the United Kingdom that dispenses the land rights in the country, has awarded 10 leases to companies to develop offshore wind farms. In all the wind farms will produce 6 gigawatts when completed.

And at least two of the wind farms you will see the novel offshore wind turbines touted by SeaEnergy Renewables and Burntisland Fabrication. These turbines essentially are built on four-legged platforms initially devised for the oil industry, rather than the conventional monopile used to hold up turbines now. The platforms require less steel, and hence cost less, than traditional turbines and they can be planted further out to sea. Two were erected earlier in the decade by Talisman to power oil platforms in the Beatrice oil field off the coast from Aberdeen, Scotland. The people who designed the turbines left Talisman to found SeaEnergy. (Burntisland Fabrication makes the platforms. SeaEnergy then buys them, erects the wind turbine on top of them and then sells the energy to utilities.)

We saw these turbines last week and got the technical rundown from SeaEnergy’s Allan MacAskill last week. Read more here.

SeaEnergy is part of a group that won the rights to develop a 920-megawatt turbine off Inch Cape and also in a group that won the righ to build a 905 megawatt farm in the Beatrice field.

You will probably see the design pop up in other farms too. Burntisland says it already has orders for 44 platforms and will expand to 100 a year soon. One of the other winners in the Crown Estate was Fred Olsen Renewables. Olsen is an investor in SeaEnergy.

They are nuts for wind in scotland, which hopes to get half of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Twenty-five percent of Europe’s wind resources are located offshore. If Scotland votes for indepedence in 2011, it’s really going to through of the U.K.‘s renewable energy plans.