Sir, – Chris Horn’s article on the sustainability of offshore wind power (“Offshore wind farm technology is not particularly green when its ‘whole of life’ is considered”, Innovation, May twenty fifth) ignores the progress in reliability, price and sustainability which has been revamped the previous twenty years of offshore wind deployment in Europe. First, it is very important contemplate the context of the transition to renewable power. A single 12 megawatt offshore wind turbine may very well be anticipated to generate one million megawatt-hours of electrical energy over a typical lifetime of 20 years. If that electrical energy was generated by in a standard pure gas-fired energy station it will require the extraction and combustion of roughly 178 million cubic metres of fossil fuel, and round 350,000 tonnes of CO2 can be added to the ambiance. Offshore wind farms usually pay again the carbon “debt” incurred by their fabrication and set up inside one yr of operation.

Second, the end-of-life of wind generators could be managed sustainably and cost-effectively. Early offshore wind farms within the Baltic Sea have already been efficiently decommissioned.

It is true that the blades of most present-day generators are primarily composed of glass fibre bolstered plastic, a tough materials to recycle. However, our US-Ireland analysis mission Re-Wind has demonstrated the financial, technical and environmental feasibility of repurposing blades from decommissioned wind generators. Re-Wind has designed and constructed a bridge on the Midleton-Youghal Greenway in Co Cork which makes use of two 25-year-old decommissioned blades as the principle load-bearing parts, considerably lowering the amount of metal wanted for the bridge.

Repurposing additionally retains blade supplies out of landfills or incinerators.

No type of power exploitation is solely freed from environmental impacts, however offshore wind power has two main benefits – it may be put in at giant scale, and as a expertise with very low complete lifecycle emissions it could actually make the best contribution to decarbonising our power system within the subsequent decade. – Yours, and many others,

PAUL LEAHY,

Lecturer in

Wind Energy,

School of Engineering

and Architecture,

University College Cork.