EWEA’s Communication Director looks at the need for greater grid investments…

By Julian Scola

The sometimes destructive power of the wind has made the headlines a lot recently and this weekend it was the UK’s turn as the tail-end of hurricane Katia lashed the island nation. As the storm left UK shores on Monday, some newspapers reported a different kind of story – Scottish wind farms produced so much electricity that they were disconnected from the grid. A total of 13 wind farms were turned off on Monday morning as winds reached 90mph overloading the national grid, the Scottish Herald said.

Barclays bank has launched a new £100 million investment fund for UK farmers to invest in renewable energy, the bank announced this week. The launch of the fund follows a survey of UK farmers carried out by Barclays which found that over one-third are “expecting to invest in renewable energy, with the majority doing so within the next year.”

Some 80% of the farmers questioned said they think that renewable energy can provide significant cost savings, with 60% saying that renewable energy could generate additional income for their farm business, Barclays said. Meanwhile, Barclays itself predicts that the costs of wind power will fall by up to 50% in the next three to five years.

By Raha Obaei

The UK government has called for ambitious goals on offshore wind energy in the government’s ‘UK Renewable Energy Roadmap’, published on Tuesday. The targets – for 18 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2020 instead of 13 GW called for by the Committee on Climate Change, a government advisory body – have been made with the hopes of making the UK one of the largest offshore wind power hubs in the world.

The wind power industry in England has just published a Protocol statement that will see communities living near future onshore wind farms larger than 5 MW realise significant additional economic benefits.

“We, as an industry, are committed to ensuring that a proportion of the benefits delivered by these projects are realised within the communities that live near them,” noted a study by the renewable energy trade association and EWEA member RenewableUK.

The association said on Wednesday that a community benefit scheme will receive support equivalent to a minimum value of at least £1,000 (€1,185) per megawatt of installed capacity annually.

A new milestone in offshore wind energy was reached today as the world’s largest offshore wind farm opened off the east coast of the UK. The Thanet wind farm in Kent comprises 100 turbines which will be able to produce 300 MW of electricity, enough to power more than 200,000 homes a year.

Chris Huhne, UK environment secretary, is set to officially open the farm today. “We are an island nation and I firmly believe we should be harnessing our wind, wave and tidal resources to the maximum,” Huhne told the BBC.

Once Thanet is online, the amount of electricity generated by wind power in the UK will reach nearly 5 GW – or enough to power 3 million homes.
Maria McCaffery of Renewable UK said that Britain was on the verge of exporting wind powered electricity.