July 27, 2022
Today is a day at sea, a day I imagined standing at the railing of our balcony or gazing out the many windows around the ship at nothing but water as far as the eye can see. Well, there is water as far as the eye can see, that part I go right. But that ain’t all there is. There are also a whole lotta other boats way over there, probably travelling in a shipping lane parallel to the course of the Viking Mars (our ship). I remember being surprised by that on our World Cruise, too, the number and frequency of shipping vessels we would be sharing the water with. Maybe that should have been expected on this cruise as well.
What I definitely didn’t expect were the turbines. Enormous turbines popping up by the dozens all along our route. There’s just no escaping progress or man’s mark on the universe these days, even hundreds of miles out into the North Sea.
Turns out these windmills are part of the world’s largest off-shore wind project, a 3.6-gigawatt solar farm in the North Sea. The project is using the world’s largest turbines – 13-megawatts and standing 850 feet tall, five times higher than the Arc de Triomphe – to generate power for more than 4.5 million homes in the U.K. Each turbine’s blades measure 351 feet, longer than a soccer field, and can generate enough electricity in one rotation to power the average British household for two full days. The project is expected to be completed in 2026 and will generate approximately 5 percent of the U.K.’s electricity when it is fully operational. The windmills are located in an area previously dominated by oil and gas operations, so I guess that’s a good thing. Wind power seems a lot less damaging to the environment than drilling, but still…there’s a part of me that wishes there was some space man hadn’t conquered, some place we could go and just gaze in awestruck wonder.
JodockWorldTravel 