Anni Podimata, VP of European Parliament
Wind will be at the centre of Europe’s power needs, meeting 50% of electricity demand by 2050, Robert Clover from MAKE Consulting said today. Moreover, “after 2020 wind is the cheapest technology, it is scaleable and it has minimal water requirements,” he added.
Speaking at EWEA’s 2013 Annual Event in Vienna, Clover said onshore wind will achieve parity with other electricity-generating technologies feeding into the grid in Europe by 2015, followed by offshore in 2022/2023.
Clover’s opinion was backed by several high-level speakers at EWEA 2013 including Fatih Birol, Chief Economist at the International Energy Agency, who said that almost all onshore wind projects in Europe will be fully competitive with gas very soon.
Clover added another element to the cost of energy debate by saying that if carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is added to thermal generation, then costs could rise by up to another 50%.
continue reading »
Wind energy is expanding across Europe – currently the continent has over 100 GW of wind energy capacity with levels set to rise as the EU continues on its path to a 20% share of renewable energy by 2020, but the expansion in the number of skilled workers the sector requires is not keeping up.
TPWind – wind energy’s research and development platform – is set to release new statistics at the European Wind Energy Association’s 2013 Annual Event in Vienna early February revealing just how deep the skills shortage runs today, and is likely to run in the future.
Engineers are in short supply, especially in operations and maintenance, the statistics will show.
continue reading »
Despite the on-going global economic slowdown, growth predictions about China’s wind power sector are optimistic. On Monday, the deputy director general of China’s National Energy Administration acknowledged that wind energy is the third largest source of electricity in the world’s most populous nation after thermal and hydro power.
“Wind power has become the third-largest electric power in China,” Liu Qi said. “There is no electric power to substitute the position of wind power as number three, following thermal power and hydropower.”
A press release noted that China’s current energy policy says that wind power in the nation will be developed efficiently because it “is the non-hydro renewable energy with the biggest possibility of large-scale development and market utilisation at the moment.”
continue reading »
A recent announcement by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) that says the costs of onshore wind farm operations and maintenance (O&M) continue to fall rapidly is further proof that the electricity-generating technology is both affordable and dependable.
The wind energy sector is making significant improvements not just in the capital cost and performance of its turbines, but also in the ongoing cost of operating and maintaining them once installed, the BNEF announcement said, adding the average operations and maintenance costs since 2008 saw a cumulative decrease of 38%, or just over 11% per year. Operation and maintenance costs are only a small part of the overall costs in particular for onshore wind energy.
“Wind power has done much to improve its competitiveness against gas-fired and coal-fired generation in recent years, via lower-cost, more technically advanced turbines, and more sophisticated siting and management of wind farms,” Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in a press release.
continue reading »
Inspecting wind turbine blades is a time-consuming part of operating a wind farm and not always exact given that many inspections are carried out from the ground. The ability to send robots to the top of these increasingly bigger structures to monitor the blades is clearly attractive and two companies believe they may have found a way to turn this into reality.
continue reading »
