With just over two weeks to go before the biggest gathering of wind energy professionals takes place in Copenhagen at EWEA 2012, Felix Ferlemann, CEO of Siemens Wind Power and Chair of this year’s event, tells the EWEA blog of his ambition for the industry and of the challenges that lie ahead…
Where and what are the biggest challenges Siemens Wind Power is currently facing?
The biggest challenge we face is that we have to bring down the cost of wind power. We need to make it competitive with conventional energy sources, because price pressure is growing and wind power cannot be dependent on subsidies forever. The industry will need to invest massively in innovation and industrialisation. But these investments will only be realised if companies have a stable and profitable pipeline of projects. That is our main message to policy makers: We need reliable support schemes so we can make wind power competitive within the current decade.
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In just a few weeks Copenhagen will be a hive of wind energy activity as EWEA’s annual conference and exhibition gets going. In the run-up to the event, the EWEA blog spoke to Ana Estanqueiro, Chair of a session aimed at discovering how to integrate large amounts of wind power into Europe’s grids…
What are the main obstacles in Europe to integrating large amounts of wind power?
The main barriers these days are much less on the “hardware” side (access to transmission and distribution grids) and much more on the “software” side: grid-operation principles and electricity market rules. These are currently not well adapted to wind power and need to evolve in order to smoothly incorporate wind-powered electricity. Today, difficulties related to grid access are largely for offshore projects where investments are extremely high and usually need to be coordinated with other economic sectors.
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Ireland is on the threshold of becoming an exporter of energy. Having traditionally imported fuel or burned locally-produced peat to provide energy, Ireland is now looking at bringing in €6bn a year in export revenues in less than a decade.
The source of this potential “windfall” is the increasing number of wind farms around the country. This growth is encouraged by the government, whose Minister for Energy Pat Rabbitte today announced the opening of a new support scheme for renewable energy at the Irish Wind Energy Association’s annual conference in Dublin.
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A coalition of eight leading European energy companies has written a letter to the European Commission and Presidency of the European Council calling for legally binding 2030 targets for renewable energy, carbon cutting and energy efficiency as well as for the modernisation of energy infrastructure.
The letter was signed by SSE, Eneco, DONG Energy, Public Power Corporation, ACCIONA, Sorgenia, EWE and EDP Renewables.
“The lack of binding targets post 2020, an ETS [Emissions Trading System] failing to stimulate investment in renewables, and an outdated energy infrastructure severely threaten to wreck the needed modernisation and decarbonisation of the European energy sector,” the letter published by Euractiv says.
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Last week the UK and France signed an agreement on nuclear power that could – going by the growing body of evidence on the rising cost of nuclear power – prove to be a huge drain on the public purse in the future. But at the same UK-France summit, a separate agreement was clinched to build an electricity interconnector between the two countries that could see Europe stepping closer to a more energy-secure future.
The interconnector cable, known as the FABLink, will connect France, the Channel Island of Alderney and mainland Britain. Edward Davey, UK Energy Secretary, said he recognises the “importance of further developing new electricity interconnectors between our two countries in order to strengthen further the linking of our grids, improve the security of our energy supplies and facilitate the integration of intermittent energy sources.”
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