The United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Edward Davey, approved the Dogger Bank Creyke Beck wind project.
Since its inauguration in 2012, the world's largest offshore wind farm has been the London Array (located about 20 kilometers off the coast of Kent, United Kingdom), which consists of 175 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of 630 megawatts.
The Dogger Bank Creyke Beck project, on the other hand, includes two adjacent wind farms (A and B) that would total more than 400 wind turbines and 2.4 gigawatts of installed capacity (nearly four times that of the London Array). Under normal operating conditions, the new wind project could supply the electricity consumed by some two million British households, according to the developers of this offshore wind farm (the technical term for such a facility).
The Dogger Bank Creyke Beck project is being developed by the British private consortium Forewind, which includes the companies RWE, SSE, Statkraft, and Statoil. The offshore area where the wind turbines would be installed is located about 130 kilometers off the coast of Yorkshire and Humberside.
The planning permission approved by the British government was preceded by a comprehensive environmental impact assessment and represents an important step in the Dogger Bank Creyke Beck project, though it is neither the only nor the final step.
