make Britain the “Saudi Arabia of wind power”, as the European nation expands its reliance on renewable energy sources. The contribution of wind power to the UK’s electricity generation, surpassed that of coal in 2016 and nuclear a couple of years later. In 2020, 24.8 per cent of UK electricity supplied was powered by wind, but to meet its net zero pledge for 2030, the country needs to build more wind farms, its biggest renewable energy source.
The Norfolk Boreas, together with another wind farm project off the Norfolk coast, called the Norfolk Vanguard, are expected to power up to 3.9 million homes, around 10 per cent of the homes in the United Kingdom. However, experts have recently expressed their concern over the new projects, as they may endanger the safety of some of Britain’s most significant colonies of endangered sea birds which inhabit the north Norfolk coast. While the project in itself involves the disruption of the areas where the birds feed, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the blades of the wind turbines could kill the birds.
“We are very concerned about the cumulative impact of all these turbines in one space,” an RSPB source told the Guardian. “The secretary of state has ‘accepted’ other wind farms will impact on seabirds in this area (some globally important colonies for kittiwakes and others) – and the mitigation methods being proposed are untried and untested, so it could well be over a decade before we know if they will be successful, by which time the damage will have been done to the colony.”
