Irish Examiner View: Most wind farms should be offshore

It is unsurprising that the world’s largest onshore windfarm is in China, or, more accurately, spread across a region of that vast country. The Jiuquan Wind Power Base has 7,000 wind turbines standing across Jiuquan, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Xinjiang, Jiangsu and Shandong. In contrast, southeastern Romania’s Fântânele-Cogealac Wind Farm wins Europe’s blue riband as the continent’s largest onshore wind farm. It is made up of a modest 240 turbines — a tiny fraction of those at Jiuquan but absolutely spectacular by Irish standards. Here an onshore windfarm with just 28 turbines is numbered in our top five while one with 58 tops the table.

There are many reasons for this great difference but one is that even Europe’s most authoritarian regime could not impose 7,000 turbines at one location. Be that as it may, comparing the scale of onshore windfarms is beginning to look like comparing how long it took the great liners to cross the Atlantic — interesting maybe but probably anachronistic. Just as air travel quickly made the great liners of old redundant, as a mode of transport at least, technology is at the point where there is no longer a compelling argument for building onshore windfarms, especially where the quality of life for small, relatively powerless, communities is ultimately no more than collateral damage.