The largest offshore wind farm in the world | 60 Minutes

last August President Biden signed a sweeping climate bill into law making wind power a priority specifically offshore wind power the goal is to capture the force of the wind in the Open Seas and convert it into power for 10 million American homes by 2030. we have a long way to go there are only seven offshore wind turbines off the coast of the United States compared to nearly 6 000 in Europe critics say they're expensive to build and maintain unpredictable and ugly we wanted to see for ourselves last October we reported from the largest offshore wind farm in the world along the northeast coast of England and discovered the power of Grimsby the story will continue in a moment as you fly 200 miles north of London along the coast you can see the town of Grimsby below 55 miles east of her ported we are on our way to the Hollywood Park you can't miss them elegant and a little Eerie white Giants poking out of the North Sea like something out of a science fiction Novelties this is the largest crop of offshore wind turbines in the world known as the hornsey wind farm it is hypnotizing more than 300 turbines spread across 335 square miles generating enough electricity to help power more than 2 million homes a day yeah a beautiful day to understand the power size and upkeep of this evolving technology we geared up on land traveled 90 minutes on the heaving North Sea with 24 year old bridey salmon her job is to scale and service the turbines my job with the help of a little anti-nausea gum was to Simply hold down my lunch yeah it is yeah how are you feeling I feel um okay it's more important how do you feel yeah I'm feeling good um like I said I'd like to think I've got my sea legs on so when your last name is salmon negotiating Rough Waters is sort of in your DNA variety's great-grandfather worked on the Grimsby docks her dad owns this 100 year old smoked fish shop in town bridey was bartending when she decided to apply to an apprentice program to be a Turbine Technician she was one of seven people selected from a pool of 500. so I've looked around here then guys The Apprentice program combines classroom instruction on the bottom and it's and it's spinning with Hands-On work at sea but we soon learned that mother nature is a temperamental teacher the weather here is Ever Changing yeah yeah we're holding on for our day live yeah yeah I mean I mean it's the North Sea it's not something we can control so every day is different and it can change like that so it's just part and parcel of the job anything to get these things turning this is the environment for wind turbines it's got to be windy as we approach the turbines we suddenly felt small you don't get a sense of how large things are until you're right up under this yeah well that's it I mean so at the very top in the cell um all the way to the top of the blades there's half the size of the Eiffel Tower which is pretty massive and and because you've got nothing normal to compare it to like a building yeah you just see these in the distance and then you're here and it's yeah they're pretty bloody huge translation there are nearly 600 feet high with spinning fiberglass blades roughly the length of the world's largest passenger jet each blade weighs almost 30 tons the turbines are partially assembled onshore then shipped out to sea where each blade is attached with surgical Precision to the top of the turbine every angle has to be perfect to generate maximum power once installed keeping them spinning is critical offshore wind Engineers say one revolution can power one home in the UK for 24 hours and that's where variety comes in it's raining yeah it's windy in the office all right in choppy Waters Captain Peter Broughton has to find The Sweet Spot maintaining Constant Contact between the bow and bass traffic courtesy requires some days the winds are so high and sees so rough the job can't be done on this day success all right I'll see you later bridey harnesses herself to a cable puppy yeah it leaps to a ladder Begins the climb rung by rung eight stories to the top see when the Lions V1 RadioShack on a narrow platform hanging over the North Sea she makes her rounds the lights are working carefully inspecting and servicing the turbine a job not for the faint of heart what was that like the first time you made that car oh exhausting exhausting yeah it was because you've got all your safety kit on as well so you've probably got about 10 kilograms of harnesses and and Claws and you're going to be clipped in so you've got that friction of climbing I would imagine it would be kind of scary yeah really scary I remember there was one day it was super windy so we were up there and the top of the tower is moving so you've got those sea sickness the motion sickness from the seat and then the top of the tower is moving so all day you're rocking and it was cold and windy and I remember coming back on Shore if I was just rocking I was like I'm on land now I don't need to rock but it's yeah it's pretty scary bench psych says those kinds of extraordinary efforts are needed in extraordinary times Sykes is the vice president of offshore wind at orsted a danish-based global energy supplier that runs the hornsey wind farm you know we have a cost of energy crisis in Europe and in Britain at the moment that's driven by the pandemic but also of course by the terrible situation in Ukraine and all of that adds up to a real drive to find clean cheap Energy Solutions about six years ago orsted decided to sell off its oil and gas business and focus on renewable energies Grimsby a depressed fishing Town became the unlikely backdrop to Europe's clean energy movement why here why Grimsby it's got a good port and it's geographically really well located physically in terms of the water depth in terms of the wind resource and of course places to connect to the National Grid so that we can get that power to homes and businesses long before Russia's invasion of Ukraine set off the energy crisis the UK had a strategy to use a hundred percent clean or renewable electricity by 2035. when you talk about clean energy you talk about solar hydropower biofuels what makes offshore wind unique offshore wind is the really the only project in most countries where you can build it at the kind of power station scale that we need if I think about the pro Jets we're building here in the UK that's almost three gigawatts and that's broadly speaking the output of a nuclear power station so we're talking large-scale infrastructure projects most of Europe is too populated to fit very very large wind farms or solar Farms so that's why we've gone offshore one big criticism is costs they're expensive to construct to transmit into decommission is that cost passed on to Consumers so that's simply wrong offshore wind power is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation in the UK we've privately fund it together with Investment Partners that we bring in private leaf and that yeah there's no public exposure to the costs of building offshore wind and I think the thing that's made the most difference is the fact that we've had political consensus now for more than a decade and that's given investors confidence to step in and put the big money on the table to get these projects away gas and nuclear still make up a majority of the power supply flowing into UK homes and businesses but this year 14 of Britain's energy has come from offshore wind only China produces more offshore wind power than the UK here's how it works wind turns the blades around a shaft inside the turbine which bins a generator energy then travels down going 300 feet beneath the water surface to cables buried under the seabed connecting to an offshore substation then to a power station on land where that electricity created out at Sea is transferred into homes and businesses inviting the question what happens if the wind stops blowing using satellites and other technology we can predict extremely accurately how much we're going to generate over the next days which enables those who operate the grid to make very clear plans about where's demand going where's Supply going I mean if I look at the turbines that we've got out in hornsey they're operating 98 99 of the time this is Grimsby [Music] 's 1970 the town hosted the largest fishing fleet in the world with 700 trawlers a wash in cash and a port fit for a visit from the queen oh it was absolutely brilliant the the camaraderie because you you can say nearly 100 of the population would be associated with the fishing industry in some way Dennis Avery and Bob Formby were part of the town's fishing tradition what was it like no it's a tough job it's work from sailing until you get back in the port again working in the winter around Iceland and then places was was pretty severe but um it's the kind of job that I would do again tomorrow in those days you had two choices you worked on the docks or you went to sea Deca Navigator Avery captained this hulking steel fishing trawler the Ross tiger for eight years if you caught a good trip and you steam it home back to Grimsby with a fish room full of fish you know it's a marvelous feeling that marvelous feeling ended when Iceland Britain's neighbor to the north began enforcing fishing restrictions in their Cod Rich Waters fish to Grimsby may swing to a pickle what'd you see happen in town when that happened gosh it was a disaster to be quite honest because everybody was involved somewhere in fishing like taxi drivers the pubs the dress shops and places like that they all suffered you know once they're fishing so I went it all sort of died of death wind power has breathed new life into Grimsby offshore Energy company orstead says it's created 600 jobs here and invested over 18 billion dollars in local wind farms but there are plenty of people who worry the environmental impact of the wind turbines hasn't been sufficiently studied and others say the industry has not created the number of jobs they've promised the concern of these retired fishermen is more practical we're not seeing benefits your electricity bill hasn't gone down no no it's gone up if anything when they said about him out are we going to get cheap electricity and it's going to be you know green and everything but I can't see any benefits to be quite honest but has your electricity bill gone down try double it's doubled there are people who said yeah we've got all these turbines but our electricity bill hasn't gone down a cent yeah I mean it is a real challenge that it's going to take time because we need to build more offshore wind so you think if there's more offshore wind prices could go down yeah absolutely fearing the war in Ukraine could lead to blackouts last winter the UK government announced more drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea they will also speed up the time it takes for new offshore wind projects to get online Ben Sykes told us that over the next eight years or said plans to invest another 17 billion dollars in wind farms and add more than 300 jobs in Grimsby you know the fishing industry was fantastic for Grimsby that that era has passed what we want to do is to be part of creating the next chapter of grimsby's life and of the country's Life as we build out a chapter variety salmon is very much a part of so that's gone from Grimsby being the fishing town to the PowerHouse of the north which is an amazing transition proud of it so proud of it and to be a part of it it's amazing a Town's future and Fortune once again tied to the Sea what it takes to film offshore wind turbines you have to do a course where you get flipped upside down and submerged in water at 60 minutes overtime.com

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 208,812

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, wind power, wind farm, grimsby, england

Id: Bl61tzR32sE

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023