A monster wind farm bigger than Manhattan was just completed in the Irish Sea. Here's what it looks like.
The Wallney Extension is an array of 87 turbines in the Irish Sea off the west coast of England. At capacity, the wind farm provides enough power for more than 590,000 homes.
The turbines sit less than 12 miles away from Wallney Island in England.
The farm has two of its own electrical substations. It first generated power in August 2017, but construction wasn't complete until June 2018.
Source: Orsted
Just a single blade rotation from a turbine on the new wind farm provides enough power to take care of an entire household's needs for more than a day, Orsted said.
The farm is hooked up to more than 186 miles of cables, which connect the wind power to England's national grid. Here's what all that cable looked like when it was being hauled out to sea.
The Wallney Extension beats existing offshore wind farm records for both power and size. It is 9 square miles larger and 29 megawatts more powerful than the world's number two offshore wind farm, the London Array, which sits off the southeast coast of the UK.
The world's largest wind farm overall is located on land in China.
Offshore wind isn't cheap. It costs around 20 cents per kilowatt hour to produce, but the price is projected to tumble to just 10 cents per kilowatt hour by 2022. That would make it roughly three times the price of onshore wind power.
As prices for renewable energy sources like wind continue to fall, more people around the world are expected to begin relying on them to power their lives. Energy sources including wind and solar are expected to provide close to half of the world's energy needs by 2050.
Sources: International Renewable Energy Agency, Business Insider, US Department of the Interior
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