The Netherlands is now home to one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world with 150 turbines located north of Ameland in the North Sea. Northland Power’s Gemini windpark is expected to meet the energy needs of 1.5 million people over the next 15 years, reported The Guardian.

The company said the windpark had the capacity to generate 600 megawatts of energy, and it would supply renewable energy to at least 7,85,000 Dutch households. “We are now officially in the operational stage,” the company’s managing director Matthias Haag said. “It was quite a complex undertaking, particularly as this windpark lies relatively far offshore... so it took quite a lot of logistics”.

The €2.8-billion (around Rs 19,724 crore) project was first conceived in 2010. Canadian independent renewable energy company Northland Power, wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Wind Power, Dutch maritime contractor Van Oord and waste processing company HVC came together to build the windpark.

Haag said the windpark which is expected to generate 13% of the renewable energy that the Netherlands needs has “shown that a very large project can be built on time, and in a very safe environment”.

The Netherlands has historically been behind most other European nations when it comes to using renewable energy sources. However it has been steadily increasing its clean energy output in the past few years, and wants to increase its usage from 5.5% in 2014 to 14% in 2020.