Visionary American media mogul Ted Turner lived up to his fiery reputation on Monday at the opening general session of the WINDPOWER 2011 Conference & Exhibition in California by telling attendees that so-called “clean coal” is a fallacy.
Turner also told the conference, organised by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and held this year in Anaheim, that the US wind power industry should prepare an expensive public relations campaign to aggressively fight the corporate coal and oil lobby.
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The UK’s National Grid launched an unusual competition last week – to design the electricity pylons of the future that will carry green electricity from onshore and offshore wind farms, and other power sources, to the consumer. The UK has around 88,000 pylons built in a steel lattice tower using a design that has barely changed since the 1920s.
Chris Huhne, UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said: “the dual challenge of climate change and energy security puts us on the brink of a new energy construction age. The equivalent of twenty new power stations is needed by 2020, much more beyond that, and they’ll all need connecting to the grid.”
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The US wind power industry is expected to experience the second highest rate of revenue growth when compared to other national industry sectors between 2010 and 2016, according to a new market research report which tracks shifting economic data.
Released on Monday, IBISWorld’s report on the top 10 fastest growing American industries forecast that revenue generated by the wind energy sector would grow 11.2% in the next five years.
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Recently I wrote a letter to the Financial Times (published 16 May) on the costs of nuclear power compared to renewable technologies. My purpose in writing was to correct a statement which Steve Radley, Director of Policy at EEF (a UK manufacturers organisation), made in a letter published in the Financial Times 11 May.
In it Radley claimed that “most renewable energy technologies are likely to remain considerably more expensive than alternative forms of low-carbon generation such as nuclear”. This is misleading because – although nuclear may or may not be cheaper than some less developed renewable energy sources – wind accounts for over 70% of renewable energy capacity installed in Europe in the last decade.
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UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne told Parliament on Tuesday that the Government has agreed greenhouse gas emissions in Britain will fall at least 50% over 1990 levels by 2027.
Huhne’s dramatic announcement that the agreement will become law puts Britain in place to become a world leader in the fight against climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.
It also sets in motion the likelihood that increasingly larger amounts of emissions-free electricity generated by wind power and other renewables will be used in the UK to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide currently being pumped into the atmosphere.
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