In 2023, the United Kingdom — home to the world's largest fleet of offshore wind turbines, concentrated in the North Sea, Irish Sea, and Thames Estuary — generated approximately 31 percent of its total electricity from wind power, with offshore turbines for the first time producing more than any other single energy source including gas. The Hornsea One and Hornsea Two wind farms off the Yorkshire coast became the world's two largest offshore wind farms during this period, with a combined capacity exceeding 2,400 megawatts. Britain's position at the intersection of Atlantic weather systems and shallow continental shelf seas gave it exceptional offshore wind resources that it had developed more aggressively than any comparable nation.

The transformation of the North Sea and Irish Sea — both richly literary bodies of water in British and Irish culture — into wind energy landscapes has provoked substantial literary reflection on the changing nature of the maritime sublime. W.S. Graham's great North Sea poems, the Irish and Northumbrian seafaring traditions, and the long history of British naval poetry all contribute to a cultural memory against which the wind farm seascape is now measured. Contemporary British nature writers including Robert Macfarlane and poets including Sean Borodale have engaged with offshore wind as part of a broader renegotiation of the relationship between industrial energy production and the literary landscapes of the British Isles.