The continent’s most turbulent body of water is finding fresh uses.
PICTURE A MECCANO set, but one made for gods. Blades as long as Big Ben is tall, rotors and tower sections the size of school buildings, shafts and generators so heavy they must be rotated every 20 minutes so as not to be crushed by their own weight: all these parts are strewn across an area the size of 150 football pitches. Clicked together, they form edifices rivalling the Eiffel Tower, except more useful—wind turbines to be planted somewhere in the North Sea.
Welcome to Esbjerg, the hub of Europe’s offshore-wind industry. Two-thirds of the turbines currently spinning off Europe’s coast, enough to power 40m homes, were put together in the Danish port town of 72,000 people. And Esbjerg’s gods have only started tinkering. The city’s port operator plans to nearly triple capacity to handle wind projects by 2026. Local engineering firms that once served the fossil-fuel industry now supply the wind-power sector instead. Meta has bought 212 hectares of farmland outside Esbjerg to build a renewables-powered data centre for its social networks. Out on the sea, cables that will ferry 30% of the international data traffic into Norway are being laid. Esbjerg’s mayor has travelled as far as Vietnam and Washington to share its success story.
With a dose of strategic thinking, and a bit of luck, a string of Esbjergs could scale up into a new North Sea economy. This would help Europe meet its ambitious climate goals and rebalance its energy sources away from countries ruled by tyrants such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Its newly minted corporate champions could offer Europe’s best, and perhaps last, chance to stay globally relevant. And it could alter the continent’s political and economic balance by creating an alternative to the sputtering Franco-German engine.
The North Sea has always been economically significant. Bordered by six countries—Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway—it is where many important shipping routes intersect. Its strong tides, which sweep nutrients to its shallow seabed, are a boon for fishermen. In the 20th century oil and gas were discovered beneath its floor. At their peak in the 1990s Britain and Norway, the two largest North Sea producers, together cranked out 6m barrels of crude a day, half as much again as the United Arab Emirates does today. One Scottish field, Brent, lent its name to the global price benchmark. As that bounty runs out—and demand for what remains dwindles amid concerns about climate change—the turbulent body of water is finding lucrative new uses.
The biggest bet is on a resource of which the sea has an infinite amount—awful weather. With average wind speeds of ten metres per second, the basin is one of the gustiest in the world. The day your correspondent visited Esbjerg speeds were twice that, enough to push the wholesale price of electricity down to nearly zero. The North Sea floor is mostly soft, which makes it easier to fix turbines to the seabed (the floating kind have yet to be deployed at scale anywhere in the world). It is also typically no more than 90 metres deep, which allows wind farms to be placed farther away from the coast, where winds are more consistent. Ed Northam of Macquarie Group, an investment firm with stakes in 40% of all British offshore wind farms in operation, says his offshore turbines work at up to 60% of capacity, compared with the 30-40% that is typical onshore.
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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Europe’s new powerhouse"
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