Offshore wind power rapidly hits the global energy scene and as a rising sector indicates growth similar to that onshore wind has over the past twenty years, says the Windpower Monthly Magazine.
First of all, Northern Europe is likely to hold its position as the cradle of offshore wind power, mostly because Denmark, Germany and the UK are ambitious on their path to fulfilling EU’s energy-generation targets by 2020.
However, Germany slowly progresses in its plans to attain 10 GW of offshore wind power by 2020. Namely, only 400MW will be installed by the end of this year, due to environmental and financial constraints that offshore wind is experiencing.
On the other side, UK’s Round 3 of project allocation process that began in 2000 is to add a capacity of 32.2GW, thus allowing the country to meet its 2020 target of 17% of energy from renewable sources as well as creating thousands of new jobs.
The issues that UK is dealing with are of a financial and technological nature. The government has set up a task force to moderate the current cost of GBP 150/MWh for offshore wind to GBP 100/MWh to make the industry more attractive to investors. To control the costs, maintenance visits to wind farms are to be kept to a minimum and the turbines must be built to resist the cruel environmental conditions.
Furthermore, France is also catching up with its neighbours with the recent tender for 3GW of capacity. The tender had four winning bids and the country’s companies have pledged to build manufacturing facilities.
On the global level, North America is moving towards offshore wind power with the Cape Wind project, along with China, which is overcoming the high costs and environmental issues thus paving the way for development of a strong offshore wind industry.
[mappress]
Offshore WIND staff, June 4, 2012; Image: Alpha Ventus