Stand at Spurn Point on a clear day and look east. Eight kilometres out across the water, in fifteen metres of depth, seventy-three white turbines turn against the horizon. From shore they look like toothpicks. Stand at the base of one of them and they are 100 metres tall, with rotor blades that sweep a circle wider than a football pitch. Together they produce 219 megawatts of electricity. The cables run back across the seabed, come ashore at Easington, and travel underground for thirty kilometres to a substation at Salt End, near Hull. Britain has built a lot of offshore wind in the last decade. Humber Gateway is one of the older grown-up turbines in the fleet.
It started in 2003, when E.ON UK's renewables subsidiary submitted a bid to the Crown Estate to develop a wind farm in the so-called 'Greater Wash Strategic Area'. A formal planning application followed in 2008, for a 300 megawatt £700 million project. Planning permission came in early 2011 for a 230 megawatt, 77-turbine scheme. By December 2011 E.ON had settled on a final design: 73 Vestas V112 turbines, each rated 3 megawatts, on a 25 square kilometre site 8 km east of Easington and 15 km north-northeast of Donna Nook. Construction contracts spread across Europe: substation design from CG Avantha, monopile foundations from TAG Energy Solutions in the UK and Sif in the Netherlands, submarine export cables from ABB, inter-turbine cabling from Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke in Germany, and substation steel from Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
The first turbine foundation was driven into the sea bed in September 2013. Two 600-tonne offshore substations were delivered to the Port of Sunderland in December 2013 for installation. By January 2014 the submarine export cables connecting the offshore transformer back to land had been laid. Through 2014 and into 2015, jack-up vessels lowered tower sections, nacelles and rotor blades onto monopile foundations one turbine at a time, weather permitting. The wind farm began generating electricity in early 2015 with 58 turbines installed. By June 2015 all 73 were running. Andrea Leadsom, then a UK government minister, formally opened it on 30 September 2015. The whole project took roughly twelve years from initial bid to ribbon-cutting.
Humber Gateway's levelised cost of electricity has been estimated at £147 per megawatt-hour - significantly higher than newer offshore wind projects coming online a decade later, where prices have dropped below £40. The economics of offshore wind have changed faster than almost anyone in 2003 predicted. The export cable connection itself - the 30 km undersea-and-underground link to the Salt End substation - was sold separately in September 2015 to the Balfour Beatty Equitix Consortium for £162.9 million, with £82 million in financing from the European Investment Bank. In 2020, as E.ON restructured its renewables business, ownership of the wind farm passed to RWE. The operations and maintenance centre is at the Port of Grimsby across the Humber, where ISG built it for £3 million in 2013 and Eric Pickles opened it in August 2014.
Humber Gateway Wind Farm is centred at approximately 53.64N, 0.29E in the North Sea, 8 km east of Spurn Point. The site covers 25 square kilometres. Recommended viewing altitude is 2,000 to 4,000 feet AGL during daylight in good visibility. Turbine tip height is 130 metres above sea level so maintain safe vertical clearance. The 73 turbines are arranged in regular rows; the offshore substation platforms sit between rows. Cable landfall is at Easington 8 km west. Nearest airports are Humberside (EGNJ) approximately 20 nm west-southwest and RAF Coningsby (EGXC) further south. Always check current NOTAMs and observe any wind farm safety zones.