Japan’s first offshore wind farm installs its first turbine

Danish wind turbine maker Vestas has installed the first wind turbine at Japan’s Akita Noshiro offshore wind farm. Akita Noshiro will feature 33 V117-4.2 megawatt (MW) wind turbines.

Japan already operates several demonstration offshore wind turbines, but Akita Noshiro is its first commercial offshore wind farm.

Twenty wind turbines will be installed off the Port of Noshiro, and 13 will be installed off the Port of Akita, in the northeast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. All 33 of the turbines’ monopiles were installed by September of last year.

The Akita Offshore Wind Corporation is developing the 140 MW offshore wind farm. It will provide electricity to Tohoku Electric Power, which has a 20-year power purchase agreement for the entire output of the wind farm.

Tohoku Electric Power services 7.6 million individual and corporate customers in six prefectures in Tohoku region, plus the Niigata Prefecture, in Honshu.

The entire offshore wind farm is expected to become fully operational this year.

Japan is aiming to deploy 10 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by 2030 and between 30 and 45 GW by 2040, including floating wind, as part of its net zero by 2050 target.

Currently, 25% of Japan’s electricity comes from clean energy. It has a plan to bump that percentage up to 38% by 2030, but that’s short of where the International Energy Agency says G7 members need to be. (For comparison, about 21% of US primary energy consumption came from fuel sources other than fossil fuels in 2021.)

At the end of May, for the first time and joining the other six member states of G7, Japan pledged to end public financing for fossil fuel projects abroad by the end of 2022.

Read more: EU renewables plan spotlights Japan’s weak targets as G7 energy meeting kicks off

Photo: Vestas

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