On the wall of my office is a dreamy picture of two wind turbines taken by my friend, neighbour and photographer Jack Lowe – my selfie above doesn’t do it any justice (couldn’t get rid of those damn reflections). These aren’t any old wind turbines, they constituted the UK’s first offshore wind farm, commissioned at Blyth on the Northumberland coast 25 years ago this month. I was living in Blyth while the turbines were being planned, but left for the bright lights of Newcastle just as their construction began. I remember the fear that people would try to swim out to them given they were a mile offshore but they looked a lot closer. Three years later, the Prof and I went back to Blyth to watch the demolition of the four chimneys of the town’s coal fired power station. The future was clean energy.

Compared to modern turbines, these two were pretty small, sweeping out an area just 10% of the current giants. But you always have to start somewhere. The turbines were decommissioned in 2019 and are currently used for testing and spares at Blyth’s Energy Catapult Centre which opened the New and Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC) in 2002. Five much larger turbines now sit further off the coast.

The graph below (produced by MTheiler and used under Creative Commons) shows how UK wind power has boomed from negligible when the Blyth wind farm was commissioned in 2000, to producing 30% of the UK’s power in 2024. Just in the last couple of weeks it has hit peaks of 55-60% of supply. And just think what will happen when we upgrade the grid to better connect the differing geographies of supply and demand (and avoid paying those dastardly constraint costs when their power cannot be used). This is undoubtedly a British success story, one which we should be proud of, and it began in Blyth.