Background

In June 2008, The Crown Estate, which manages the sea bed around the UK,  launched the third round of its leasing programme for the delivery of up to 25 gigawatts of new generation capacity from offshore wind by 2020.

RWE npower renewables submitted a bid to The Crown Estate for the Bristol Channel Zone. Our bid was successful and we were awarded the development rights for the zone which is located in the outer Bristol Channel.

Click here to see the location of the Bristol Channel Zone.

The Project

We are proposing to develop a wind farm with the capacity to generate up to 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy within the Bristol Channel Zone, known as Atlantic Array. The wind farm would be located around 16.5 kilometres (km) from closest point to shore on the North Devon coast, 22.5km from closest point to shore the South Wales coast, and 13.5km from Lundy Island.

We have agreed a connection point to the electricity network with National Grid. This will enable power to be exported from the wind farm into the national grid.

What work has taken place so far?

We carried out initial assessments to learn more about the site.  This work has been undertaken in consultation with a range of statutory bodies. The findings from these surveys were published in a document called the Preliminary Environment Information which was consulted upon during our formal public consultation in 2011.

We undertook our first round of public consultation on the Preliminary Environmental Information for Atlantic Array Offshore Wind Farm between the 10th September 2011 and 10th November 2011.

In May 2012, we announced alterations to the wind farm and, in March 2013, we revised the wind farm boundary and maximum number of turbines further to take into account consultation and engineering assessment results.

Go to the project revision page for more information.