In the Baltic sea between the German island of Rügen and the Danish Bornholm there is a new wind power station of the Norwegian national oil company Equinor.
The capacity of the wind power station is 385 MW and it should provide electricity to 400 thousand German houses. The company has invested in the project about 1.2 billion euros. By the way, the wind power station called Arkona is not the first Equinor project in the field of renewable energy. But Arkona is the largest operating wind power station in Europe.
In fact, it is the fifth, and all together the operating power of the equinor wind farm exceeds 1.1 GW. Three shelf wind stations operate on the UK shelf (Sheringham Shoal with a capacity of 317 MW was started in 2011, and Dudgeon with a capacity of 402 MW and Hywind Scotland with a capacity of 30 MW in 2017) and Hywind demo with a capacity of 2.3 MW has been operating on the Norwegian shelf since 2009.
And Equinor is not going to stop. In the near future the company wants to start four more stations with a capacity of 1.2 GW each.
It is interesting that various media claim that in the coming years Norway expects large-scale development of Arctic resources, this does not prevent the country from considering itself a leader in the field of renewable energy, because even in this area it will use RES. There is an example. Another Norwegian company DNV GL offers to use wind power to increase oil recovery on the shelf, supplying electricity for the injection of water into the formation. DNV GL expects to perform one of these projects together with the American ExxonMobil and Italian-Norwegian Vår Energi on the Norwegian continental shelf.
So, as we can see, oil companies do not abandon the idea of RES application in their activity.
