UK offshore wind: laying the groundwork today
Watch the survey work in action
Plans are critical, but it’s putting them into action that counts. As part of our strategy to get wind turbines turning, specialist vessels and crew are out on the Irish Sea undertaking massive seabed survey work. It’s an early but important step on the road to building some of the UK’s biggest offshore wind farms.
Once up and running, our Morgan and Mona projects could deliver enough capacity to power 3.4 million homes with clean electricity and help the UK to meet its climate goals. Their near-shore location – around 30 kilometres off the coast of northwest England and north Wales – will allow for lower-cost, more reliable transmission infrastructure, making them a core part of our plans for more secure and lower carbon energy for the UK.
“These surveys will enable bp and EnBW to build the most efficient offshore wind farms we can. Wind farms that will play a critical role in helping deliver the UK government’s aim of producing up to 50GW of offshore wind power by 2030 – more than enough to power every home in the UK – and bp is delighted to play a part in this.”
Richard Haydock, project director, bp
What’s happening and why?
The purpose of these deep geotechnical investigations, carried out by specialist Geo-data company Fugro, up to 100 metres below the seabed is to determine soil characteristics for foundation design (find out how it’s done in the short film, above). Collecting this data will enable bp and EnBW to build efficient offshore wind farms with the least environmental impact. It is crucial for securing government consents for the projects and defining the structure and location of the individual turbines.
An uncrewed surface vessels (USV) conducting a carbon-neutral survey to collect seabed imaging data
Our other offshore wind projects
We aim to become a leader in offshore wind and, over the past three years, we’ve built up a pipeline of projects with partners in both the US and UK that have the potential to power more than 5 million homes.
And earlier this year, we agreed to form a partnership with Marubeni to explore an offshore wind development in Japan.
It’s all part of our aim to have 20GW of developed renewable generating capacity by 2025 and 50GW by 2030 – that’s broadly enough to power the needs of 36 million people.
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