deel 2:
Another plus: Britain's decades of experience pumping oil in the North Sea. The idea was that oil-service companies that install rigs and pipelines could switch to deploying wind turbines and power cables. Big European utilities such as Germany's E.ON AG, DONG Energy of Denmark and Iberdrola SA of Spain started investing in U.K. wind.
There were setbacks. Though wind technology costs initially declined as it matured, as many technologies do, a surge in metals prices and a weaker pound pushed up costs. The 2008 credit crunch squeezed financing and stalled some projects.
That year, a consortium including Royal Dutch Shell PLC and DONG abandoned plans to place turbines in the Irish Sea after the Ministry of Defence said they would interfere with radar signals. Like civil aviation authorities, the Defence Ministry has to be consulted on every project and has often blocked those that could affect radar or air-traffic control.
The government moved to make wind attractive to investors with a lavish subsidy regime. For each megawatt hour of electricity a company produces from a green-energy source, it is awarded one "Renewables Obligation Certificate," or ROC. Power producers sell these to electric utilities, which buy them to meet a government mandate for use of renewable power.
The utilities pass much of the cost on to customers. The system adds around $18 to the average household's annual electricity bill, according to the UK's energy regulator.
An operator of a single offshore turbine producing 9,000 megawatt hours a year can earn $1 million from selling its ROCs, because offshore projects get 1 1/2 ROCs per megawatt hour instead of one. Soon such projects will get two, if accredited by the end of 2010. Some think the deep-water Round 3 projects will require even more support.
Sweden's Vattenfall, by 2008, was looking offshore for places to build large wind farms. "There are no places onshore in Europe where you can put up 100 or 200 turbines like you can in the U.S. and Canada," says the company's Mr. Nielsen. Vattenfall acquired the Thanet project off Kent from a small firm that folded in the credit crisis.
Though the rationale of wind is environmental, other environment issues intruded. Thanet's initial developer had to change the location of some turbines to avoid reefs that are formed by a marine worm called sabellaria spinulosa.
U.K. authorities banned pile-driving work in the spring, fearing the noise would scare off a type of herring that spawns in the Thames Estuary. After months of discussions, the restriction was lifted.
When seals, whales or dolphins were in the area, work couldn't start until they left. Undersea cables linking turbines had to be specially routed to avoid historic shipwrecks.
Weather often interfered. For much of the 2009 fall and winter, the seas off Kent were too rough for work.
Vattenfall also couldn't find enough local steel to build the 500-ton foundations for the turbines. They had to be imported, as did skilled workers and the turbines themselves.
One of the biggest challenges remains finding ships to install the huge and cumbersome equipment. To lay cables, Vattenfall is hiring a ship called the Polar Prince, but it is among the few of its kind and has a customer waiting list. A delay on one project can wreck the schedules of others.
The costs can be exorbitant. To deploy an offshore electrical substation, Vattenfall used a state-of-the-art heavy-lift ship called the Stanislav Yudin that rents for $450,000 a day. Some new installation ships are under construction, including one in a Korean shipyard big enough to install the huge new turbines that are being planned. But many more will be needed.
Late last year, another headache arose. Owners of a Dutch wind farm found their turbines had shifted a few inches, the result of a design flaw in equipment connecting the towers to their foundations. RenewableUK, a trade association, said most of the 336 turbines operating in U.K. waters could have the same fault, and would cost about $250,000 each to fix.
Vattenfall rushed to check its North Sea machines and found many had sunk slightly into their foundations. It is now figuring out how to repair them.
"It's an example of how this is a young industry, and we haven't yet reached the maturity we need," Mr. Nielsen says.