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Comment by jacobp100 | Hacker News Reader

The UK is doing surprisingly well for offshore wind, with 7/10 of the largest offshore wind installations in the world being here. We’re terrible for onshore though

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We've done a particularly good job of pivoting our off shore engineering expertise from north see oil to offshore wind. I see that as a massive success in reusing expertise in an old industry in a new one.

When it comes to onshore, as a relatively densely populated island it can be politicly difficult to build large wind farms anywhere but in Scotland. Add to that the reasonable argument that offshore wind is more consistent and our offshore engineering expertise, it's quick to reach the conclusion we should be (almost) all in on offshore wind.

Offshore is still more than twice as expensive as onshore. But yes, if you can’t build them onshore or if you don’t want, offshore is a great option.

What I heard is that it wasn't actually a good fit for oil companies as they tend to focus on building one-off installations. Renewables is more similar to serial production where you have to do the same thing many times. Which is a good fit for dredging companies or cable layers. My guess is that we just had a lot of coast and shallow waters.

Considering UK is an island and offshore wind tends to be more consistent than onshore (although with higher cost to build) that doesn't sound like a problem?

It's certainly true that Britain has a lot of coastline, and that even allowing for the fact you can't put wind farms in the middle of a shipping lane (unless you don't mind constant collisions because nobody in a large boat can steer worth shit, the UK also has some big rocks, which like wind turbines are marked on charts and don't move yet idiots crash boats into those all the damn time) this works out to mean we could probably more than supply our energy needs from wind turbines + storage.

On the other hand, onshore wind is cheaper and would have been viable all along, the Tories effectively banned it (technically they just made it very easy to block planning permission) for years because that wins over a certain kind of NIMBY voter. You couldn't build enough onshore wind to replace all the fossil fuels, but you could make a bigger dent than we did.

I'm not particularly well-versed in the technology but is there any reason the UK isn't utilising tidal power more? We have areas with some impressive tidal ranges including the Severn Estuary which has the second highest in the world. There was lots of talk about building a tidal lagoon in Swansea back when I lived in Wales but I've not heard anything about that since I moved away some years ago.

I think the reason is that the water keeps surprising people by being really corrosive and otherwise damaging the equipment that's inside it; so it does work, it's just been more expensive to build and maintain than the other options so far.

My understanding is that the technology for hydro isn’t really there as of today. Maybe that will change in the future - that was certainly the case for wind and solar

The Swansea tidal lagoon was well dodgy… the promoters owned a quarry in Cornwall and they wanted to sell it’s rock at inflated prices (plus producing concrete is hardly carbon friendly)

Severn barrage is interesting but would have a quite large impact on the local nature habitat

The Swansea project you're thinking of was... controversial. It sure smells a lot more like a scam than you'd ideally like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_Lagoon_Swansea_Bay

Given the small land area and extremely high population density relative to its neighbours, onshore wind in the UK was never going to be a large scale solution. "Terrible for onshore" doesn't matter if sufficient generation can be met in other more reasonable ways.

We're bad at onshore wind, not due to lack of possible sites, but because of a government ban on building it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/onshore-...

Considering the huge potential of offshore wind in the UK, I think giving priority to offshore and avoid damage to the landscape makes a lot of sense.

The guardian likes to ignore this, because it doesn't suit its reporting angle much, but England has 1.8x more population density than Germany and 3.6x(!) more than France. This means by simple maths far less available land per capita. Overall the UK comes in closer (but still ahead) of Germany but this is largely due to Scotland, which is a significant proportion of the UK landmass, but has very few people.

The government ban you mention only applies to England, which already has almost half of the UK's onshore wind despite having by far the least space for it. Making complaints that the rural population of England, already under pressure due to soaring population density, doesn't want their remaining rural spaces covered in wind turbines when plenty of other good options exist requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics to justify.

Population densities in people/km2: England 424, Scotland: 68, UK overall 272, Germany: 232, France: 118. Landmass in thousands of km2: England 130, Scotland: 77, UK overall 242, Germany: 357, France: 551.

There’s so much space in England for wind farms.

The main reason we don’t get more of it is a handful of rich land owners not wanting an “eyesore” on their estates and using their influence to get that result.

This is not a democratic country, after all.

> and extremely high population density

I mean, Belgium and the Netherlands and more dense than the UK, and Germany is only a bit less dense. Plus onshore wind can be placed in agricultural areas, in the middle of cropfields.

But the UK's offshore wind potential in incredible, so I get why we do that instead.

It is very high population density surrounded by some places with very low density. But the places with best wind resource in England tend to be AONB, national park. Areas like Lincolnshire, East Anglia have plenty of space.

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