Wind power
Apr 25, 2026 17:49
· 5:05
· English
· Whisper Turbo
· 3 speakers
ບົດບັນທຶກນີ້ຈະໝົດອາຍຸໃນ 11 ມື້
ປັບປຸງໃຫ້ເປັນບ່ອນເກັບທີ່ບໍ່ປ່ຽນແປງ →
ສະແດງແຕ່
0:01
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
Hello and welcome to the island of Jersey and today is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Tyler Dunn and I'm looking out to a patch of sea in the English Channel that could one day generate as much energy as a small nuclear reactor.
0:17
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
Offshore wind farms are getting more advanced and capable of producing more power, and they're raising an interesting question for islands across the world. Is it possible to turn a gusty bit of ocean into a serious economic opportunity?
0:34
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
Islands are land poor and sea rich. They often lack the natural resources to power their own economies. But is offshore wind technology about to change that? We import a lot of fossil fuel. It does make sense that we turn towards local renewables. This has become one of the cheapest sources of electricity. Some islands want to build offshore wind farms that are so big they could become energy exporters.
1:01
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
potentially generating serious revenue for their government. That's a substantial amount of money for an island this size and it's really going to be something that helps to diversify the economy and bolster our finances. But established island industries warn they could lose out. Fishermen are being pushed to the side for big business and we don't feel that it's right. That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC.
1:32
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
Let's start here in Jersey. It's a small, British, self-governing island not far from the northern coast of France. It's probably better known for its offshore finance industry than offshore wind. Type Jersey into a search engine and there's a good chance you'll see an image of what I'm walking around at the moment.
1:53
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
called the Air Lighthouse. It's a striking, wide lighthouse perched on jagged rocks at one end of a sweeping eight-kilometre-long bay. The word dramatic doesn't do it justice. But this view could one day look quite different, because early proposals for an offshore wind farm would see dozens of turbines, each reaching a maximum height similar to the Eiffel Tower, clustered in the sea about 15 kilometres south-west of it.
2:26
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Speaker 1 (Wind power)
from the coastline in the island's capital, St Helier, the logos of some of the world's biggest finance firms adorn the office buildings.
2:34
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Speaker 2 (Wind power)
I'll walk past a gleaming new business district looked down on from equally new luxury apartment blocks. I'm on my way to the quainter surroundings of the Royal Square, the location of Jersey's Parliament, where I meet the island's Environment Minister, Steve Luce. We have been thinking for some time that an offshore wind farm could tick many boxes and be a win-win-win. It could produce sustainable energy, which we want. It could give security to the island, which we want.
3:01
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Speaker 2 (Wind power)
could also make money for the island, which would very much please our Treasury Minister and the Exchequer. So we were very determined that it was a project worth looking at, and we've gone away and spent some considerable money on investigating further, and we're now at the point where we realise we need to pause for further discussions between either ministers from Jersey and the UK or ministers from Jersey and France to discuss the export of power.
3:30
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Speaker 2 (Wind power)
In terms of the economic opportunity and the export potential, do you have any sense of just how much of an uplift in GDP you could get from this project? We think that we could return somewhere in the region of four times every pound we spend over the course of the wind farm, which is a considerable length of time as well. So we're looking 30, 40 years ahead.
3:54
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Speaker 2 (Wind power)
But we think, you know, were we to invest £100 million over that time, we would maybe get £400, £500 back. But that's a difficult number to really be clear about before you've had the detailed discussions with either jurisdiction about how you might export that power. Not everyone is blown away by the potential of making more than half a billion dollars. Down the road in St Helios Harbour, local fisherman Stephen Viney invites me onto his boat.
4:29
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Speaker 3 (Wind power)
He tells me that the offshore wind farm project could damage his industry, which he says is already struggling. There's a lot going on with environmental impacts of fishing in areas that we're being displaced from. We fully support protecting areas, but the problem with, on top of that, having a wind farm as well, it means we're...
4:49
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Speaker 3 (Wind power)
just squeezed into a smaller and smaller area and it becomes unsustainable. More boats in a smaller area, there's not enough for us to survive basically. How much of Jersey's fishing area will be taken away from the offshore wind farm?
This transcript was generated by AI (automatic speech recognition). May contain errors — verify against the original audio for critical use. AI policy
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