The WInd Farm Location

The Map

The map above shows NBDL's current proposal for the area of the windfarm in red & pink in relation to Dorset, Hampshire and the Isle of WIght.  The red area is closer than 12 nautical miles from the coast. The dots inside the area are turbines - in this case 194 laid out in a plausible grid.  We don't know yet precisely where the turbines would be, or how many.  The black dotted line shows the whole of Zone 7 which was allocated by the Crown Estate in 2009 (without any public consultation)  and the wind farm could in principle have been anywhere inside this zone. 

The magenta coastline marks the "Jurassic Coast" World Heritage Site. Blue areas are marine protected zones.  The Dorset and Isle of Wight Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the New Forest National Park are also indicated.

The wind farm area is 8.9 miles from Durlstion, 12.5 miles from Hengistbury Head and 11 miles from the Needles.

Videos of the windfarm

We have prepared some simulations of what the proposed windfarm might look like using 3D computer graphics.  We have taken great care to make these animations as accurate as possible.  Take a look

Power Generation

Depending on wind speed and eventual farm size, the wind farm would produce anything from nothing to 970MW, but on average around 340MW, equivalent to about one fifth of a 2GW "base-load" power station or one Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power station, but of course the output is not controllable which is a huge impediment.  This is often quoted in terms of "homes".  A "home" is defined as approximately 4266kWh per year of electricity, and represents average annual household electricity use. This is a bad unit because it represents only a fraction of total household energy use (i.e. including gas, petrol and other fuels) and gives no sense of how it relates to national total energy use.  The definition also varies from year to year as household electricity use changes. Worse still, it is often subtley mis-represented in statements like "enough renewable energy to power 710,000 homes" when it should really say "enough renewable energy to meet the current average electricity needs of  710,000 homes" which is much less than the total power that those homes need.  It is also important to remember that these are only averages.  This wind farm could not actually meet the variable electricity demand of those 710,000 homes because the supply does not match the demand. The power will be fed to the national grid and used nationally, so it does not benefit the local region alone.

At the moment, the UK uses on average about 40,000MW of electricity.