Heikki Willstedt Mesa, AEE

For the last 100 days, wind energy has provided more of Spain’s power than any other source. Yet the government is cutting support for the sector and putting a major electricity provider – and domestic industry – at risk.

Heikki Willstedt Mesa, Energy Policies Director for the Spanish Wind Energy Association (AEE) explains why the government’s latest decisions are so dangerous.

Until last week, what was the situation for renewables in Spain?

According to Spanish law, companies must get a reasonable return on their investments in renewable energy, with the average being between 7 and 8%. Last year, the new government decided there would be no more incentives for new renewable energy installations after 2012.

That was a big blow for the future industry. But then afterwards, at the end of 2012, the government also approved a 7% tax on all existing power generation installations. It was supposed to be a law for the environment, but they were also taxing wind and other renewables. That meant not only future industry was impacted, but also already existing wind farms.

So what happened last week, and how has it made matters even worse?

Martin Fliegenschnee-Jaksch

Martin Fliegenschnee-Jaksch makes a habit of setting light to tea bags. It’s not a strange form of arson but a way of demonstrating thermal lift to children at the schools he visits to talk about wind energy. The tea bag, once lit, zooms up into the air – just as a turbine blade will rise up and start to turn as the wind passes over it, he told participants at the EWEA 2013 Annual Event in Vienna on Thursday.

He was speaking at a session on social acceptance, at which presenters discussed ways to communicate on wind energy and to improve public support for it.

Tomas Soderland from PowerQuest in Sweden presented a “code of conduct” that had been drawn up for wind energy developers, in order to show their commitments to “ethical standards” and in doing so get support from local stakeholders like farmers associations, he said. Could the whole European industry join together to draw up a wider code of conduct, he wondered?

Turkish Deputy Energy Minister Mercan

Less red tape, an optimised financing mechanism and talking to investors: these three steps are key to increasing wind power in Turkey, the country’s Deputy Energy Minister Mercan said.

Talking to EWEA at the 2013 Annual Event in Vienna this week, he said that slow administrative processes act as a “brake” but not a “block” on wind power investments.

He also spoke in favour of a more integrated power network with Europe, saying “We want to fully integrate the Turkish transmission system to the European network so that trade becomes easy.”

Turkey is one of the most promising – and ambitious – countries for wind energy, with a target of 20 GW by 2023, up from 2 GW today. Yet Deputy Minister Mercan said that while wind energy did have public support, there have been small communities in Turkey which have strongly opposed wind energy developments. He stressed the need to “improve knowledge of clean energy”.

The European Commission needs to provide data to compare subsidies for renewables with the “far less transparent” subsidies for coal, oil, gas and nuclear, Irish Energy Minister and current EU President Pat Rabbitte says in the latest Wind Directions magazine.

Minister Rabbitte, who is one of the keynote speakers at the opening session of EWEA 2013 this morning, also warns that moving to a 2030 low carbon target would be damaging to the 2020 renewable energy target.

The minister also discusses energy security, highlighting the role of renewables in reducing future “volatility”.

Read the full interview and more in the latest Wind Directions

Wind energy’s contribution to Belgian GDP has risen by 69% in four years (2007-2011), new findings show. This is a rate far higher than the growth of GDP itself, making wind energy a catalyst for Belgium’s economic recovery. The wind sector brought €335.3 million to the Belgian economy in 2011.

The figures come from a Deloitte study which also finds that national wind energy jobs have increased by 74% while the overall employment rate has gone up by just 3.7% (a figure 20 times lower) since 2007.