The 175,000 kilometers of coastline that add the countries of dan to North Seafrom France to Norway and included United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, will become, according to their current leaders, the largest offshore wind farm of Europe between 2030 and 2050. Its nerve center and baptism certificate is in Belgium, the country with the least coastline of the so-called “North Sea coalition”, since it barely has 67 kilometers of coastline. But considering that there is still a ninth landlocked member in the alliance –Luxembourg–, the initiative of these nine European countries must be understood as a proclamation of support for wind energy, one of the mainstays in the goal of achieving climate neutrality in 2050.
“Our coastline is modest. But, in relation to our population, our offshore wind farm ranks second in terms of European performance,” the Belgian Prime Minister said from Ostend (Belgium), Alexander deCroo. The first corresponds to Denmark, although in absolute terms the European leadership in offshore wind infrastructure corresponds to the United Kingdom, with 14 gigawatts (GW). Germany follows with eight GW, while the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium are around two or three. From this situation, with a total of 30 GW by 2022, the North Sea coalition proposes to jump to 134 GW by 2030 and 300 by 2050. That is, multiply by ten total power generated by offshore wind farms in those nine countries last year and power 120 million homes by 2030.
“The invasion of Ukraine precipitated an energy crisis in which it was necessary to resort to quick alternatives to guarantee supply to citizens and industry,” recalled the President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, from Ostend. She responded effectively to that challenge; The next objective is to achieve sufficient development of renewables to achieve decarbonization. “The European House is the house of renewables, of the development of green hydrogen and wind power”, he added.
Alternatives to Russian gas
“With the support of our partners and allies, we got rid of our energy dependence on Russia,” said the German chancellor, Olaf Schölz. He was thus alluding to the accelerated search undertaken by his government for alternatives to Russian gas. Norway played a fundamental role there as an emergency substitute for the shipments of fossil fuels that stopped arriving from Russia. It will continue to play it now through renewables, guaranteed the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, who before the “baptism & rdquor; in Ostend of the mega-wind farm subscribed with Von der Leyen an agreement to join the “green alliance & rdquor; of the community bloc, from its position as a non-community country.
In the North Sea coalition there are thus two countries outside the EU –Norway and the United Kingdom-, which will force the signing of many and very detailed protocols for the development of the wind farm.
It will be necessary to harmonize regulations between countries with great differences in terms of energy plans. Germany has set the goal of achieving that, by 2030, 80% of the energy consumption of the most populous country in Europe comes from renewables, with wind power as the mainstay. France, a European atomic power, contributed 0.5 GW of the total 30 GW of wind energy cited last year.
Artificial island
“Each country has our plans. But the common goal is shared: clean energy and climate neutrality,” said the French president, Emmanuel Macronin the appearance shared with von der Leyen, the Belgian de Croo, the German Scholz and the Danish Mette Frederiksen.
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45 kilometers offshore from Ostend, an artificial island will be installed as a knot of connections between the different arms of the offshore wind farm. It will be one of the most relevant points of the project, but not the only one. To achieve the proposed performance of the 300 GW, they must ensure interconnectivity at different levelswith offshore connection platforms whose security is one of the great challenges of the park.
The germ of the coalition formally signed in Ostend arose eleven months ago, on the Danish island of Esbjerg, between Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. A few months later, in September 2022, there was sabotage that disabled the German-Russian Nord-Stream gas pipeline, with coordinated explosions in three of its four pipelines. What happened activated the alarms and ruled out the possibility of a “reunion & rdquor; energy between Moscow and Berlin. It happened in Baltic waters, near the Danish island of Bonholm. There are multiple versions circulating in the media regarding its authorship –including an alleged pro-Ukrainian plot–. The only thing that is not in question is that the sabotage revealed the vulnerability of the energy infrastructures, as a critical objective of the first order.