Remi Gruet

By Rémi Gruet, Senior Regulatory Affairs Adviser – Climate and Environment, EWEA

It is hard to think of a newspaper more committed to free markets and hard economic facts than the Financial Times. So when it publishes a hard-hitting editorial entitled ‘Europe’s flawed carbon market’, politicians should sit up and take note.

Not impressed by the recent agreement between the EU and Australia to link their carbon markets, the editorial says that the EU’s intention to forge further links with nascent carbon markets in South Korea, some US states and China “is at present the wrong ambition.”

While the US wind power sector is currently facing challenges from the ongoing economic crisis and political uncertainty over whether politicians will extend the industry’s largest tax incentive, it received some more positive news recently: the nation’s first proposed offshore wind farm does not pose a threat to aviation.

Last week’s announcement by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is thought to clear the last federal, state and local regulatory obstacle holding up development of Cape Wind, a controversial 130-turbine wind farm to be built off Cape Cod in Nantucket Sound.

“The proposed wind turbines do not exceed obstruction standards and do not have a physical or electromagnetic radiation effect on the operation of air navigation facilities,” the FAA ruling concluded.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

At the end of last month the Economist published an article on Germany’s energy transition to renewables labelling it a “lunatic gamble”. This could not be further from the truth and in this blog we’ll explain why…

The article claimed that German plans to switch to renewable energy are risky, and yet the transition roadmap is based on the recommendations of an expert advisory panel to the German government, the German Advisory Council on the Environment. This body examined the environmental, economic and energy security impacts of a fully renewable energy system and characterised it as ‘climate-friendly, reliable and affordable’.

The blistering heat wave that broke a number of temperature records in Europe recently may be somewhat expected for August but a growing amount of evidence suggests human activity associated with climate change also likely contributed to the extreme weather.

Nobel Laureate Mario Molina said on Monday in Philadelphia that new scientific analysis strengthens the view that record-breaking summer heat, crop-withering drought and other extreme weather events in recent years do result from global warming.

“People may not be aware that important changes have occurred in the scientific understanding of the extreme weather events that are in the headlines,” Molina was quoted as saying in an American Chemical Society (ACS) press release.

Siemens new 75m turbine. Copyright Siemens

Two new technological developments in the global wind power industry have been garnering media interest recently as the emissions-free generating sector continues to increase its world-wide installed capacity year after year after year.

Siemens announced earlier in August that it had built, at 75 metres, the world’s largest rotor blade for wind turbines.

By way of comparison, and to understand just how long the new Siemens blade is, those who attended EWEA’s Annual Event in Copenhagen in April 2012 may remember that massive LM Wind Power 73.5-metre blade displayed outside the Bella Center.