Belgium Welcomes World's Largest Offshore Wind Turbine

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) -- Belgium's Thornton Bank windfarm has become home to the world's first 6-megawatt (MW) offshore wind turbine to be installed at a commercial scale operation.

REpower Systems AG (ETR:RPW) (Hamburg, Germany) and partner C-Power (Zwijndrecht, Belgium), have installed the first of 48 of the Repower 6M turbines, rated at 6.15 MW each, at the Thornton Bank windfarm, located approximately 30 kilometres off the port of Ostend. The turbines, which will comprise Phases II and III of the windfarm, will have a combined generating capacity of 295 MW. The windfarm already has a capacity of 30 MW, provided by six 5 MW turbines which were installed in 2009. When completed at the end of 2013, the windfarm will be capable of generating 325 MW, enough to power approximately 600,000 homes.

Thornton Bank is one of the largest project-financed offshore windfarms in Europe. Germany's RWE Innogy, the renewable energy division of RWE AG (PINK:RWEOY) (Essen, Germany), is the lartgest shareholder with 26.7% of the project. In December 2010, eight European commercial banks, alongside the European Investment Bank (EIB), provided essential funding of €900 million ($1.28 billion) for Phases II and III of the project. For additional information, see December 2, 2010, article - Belgium's Thornton Bank Windfarm Gets €900 Million Uplift.

"The installation of the first 6 MW turbine in a commercial offshore wind farm is an important milestone for the entire offshore wind industry," said Prof. Martin Skiba, Head of Offshore Wind Power at RWE Innogy. "It marks another step along the road towards larger offshore wind power plants with ever more powerful machines. The experience we are gathering with the construction of these plants is of great value to us because we are also going to use this turbine in our German offshore wind farm, Nordsee Ost."

According to RWE the nacelle on the 6 MW turbine is the size of a average family home while the 126 metre wide rotors sweep the surface area of two football pitches. Acxh turbine iscapable of powering up to 6,000 homes. The first 18 rotor blades were delivered to the port of Ostend in mid-March, while the nacelles and tower segments were transported on pontoons by sea from Bremerhaven.

It is estimated that 30 of the turbines will be installed on site by September this year, with the final 18 turbines slated for 2013.

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