The offshore wind farms

Most wind power turbines are still installed on land, but the future could lie on offshore. Wind speeds over oceans are on average twice as high as over land, making offshore wind parks an interesting alternative, but technically a more challenging alternative. The biggest technical problem is that wind energy cannot be produced just anywhere; average wind speeds must be good enough to make installing a turbine cost-effective.

The future of wind energy development in Europe and worldwide is undoubtedly the offshore wind farm. Spain is the second European country in installed wind power. In 2006, Spain had a total of 11,730 MW of capacity installed on its mainland. The new offshore wind farms will be built on sites along Spain's 4000-kilometer-long coast under a license scheme. With significant own technology, now Spain is preparing to begin the development of offshore technology with the release of specific legislation and an environmental analysis of the entire national coastline.

Research has shown that Spain has great potential for getting energy from offshore wind turbines.”Spain is a peninsula with sea on three sides and so is one of the best places in the world for building wind farms at sea”.  Studies indicate that offshore wind parks could generate between 3,000 and 7,000 terawatt-hours (TWh)/a year in the seas of European countries as a whole and 140 and 500 TWh/a year in the seas of Spain.

Spain -- the world's second leading producer of wind power -- has passed a new law allowing wind parks to be built off its coast. It is predicted that the offshore wind parks will generate between 2,000 and 3,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity by 2020. That would represent a major contribution to Spain's future wind power production.

Offshore wind energy is taking off in the Spanish panorama. After several years with limited activities in this field, the present situation is moving on, and there are several indicators to be optimistic about future developments in Spain. The new regulation of the procedures, conditions and criteria for authorizations of permissions for the construction of offshore wind power plants, establish a simplified procedure for offshore wind installations. Spanish Ministry of Industry has undertaken a study of the coastline to identify the best sites for building wind turbines and to assess the impact of wind parks on the landscape.

In the middle of 2009 there were only 1500 wind megawatts installed into the sea. Although the first offshore wind farm experiment took place in 1990, most of the facilities built up to now since then were pilot projects. These statements show the incipient of offshore wind power. At this moment, however, the boom of offshore wind energy finally seems to be happening. There are a few countries at the top of current offshore wind energy development (United Kingdom, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Germany; followed at a distance by a few others, Spain, France, etc). This current situation, the row materials problem and the general commitments to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases are leading to predict a promising future for offshore wind power.

The trend towards the introduction of wind farms in deep water has led to designs that are prototypes today, but certainly given the energy crisis it will soon be available, many countries already provide for the development of  offshore wind.The Spanish resource for offshore wind power plants seems to be enormous, but the main barrier is that waters are deep waters, that require new technology to be developed. Spanish industries and research centers are working in this direction.

At present there is no offshore farm in Spain. The Canaries are one of the best places in Spain in terms of value of the resource and they  have to look to the offshore wind as an opportunity to extract energy without occupying valuable and scarce land, using own resource and diversifying the energy basket.

This is primarily to establish the search criteria of areas, and have been divided into three categories: Technical, Environment and Territorial. Firstly we have to find places   where technically wind farms could be located because of the resort, with little depth and access to coast to be viable. The second filter will be the environmental analysis for protecting sites in the sea or in coast.

Bathymetry will have to determine the depth of each zone. At present, there are parks more of 40 m deep, so it has defined the height of 50m in the first instance, but in the near future will be possible to descend deeper. Only in the electrical systems of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria offshore wind farms could be installed, but not with current technology, since we are talking about areas where the depth exceeds fifty meters, with less than two hundred meters.

The benefits of offshore wind farms are the not occupation of land, high value of the resource and less  turbulence. The drawbacks are the high cost and difficulty installation and maintenance. Wind turbines - large or small - are not always welcome additions to the landscape. Many people find them loud and unsightly. They are also known to disrupt electro-magnetic communication signals. Others claim that turbines endanger wildlife, particularly birds, though this is disputed.

Concerns about the impact of off shore wind parks on Spain's thriving tourist industry have been one reason why the construction of wind turbines has been restricted to the country's mainland.