A new Green Investment Bank worth €1.18 billion (£1 billion) will “tackle risk the market cannot currently finance”, allowing new types of investment in green infrastructure, UK Energy Minister Charles Hendry told Wind Directions magazine recently. The Bank is due to become operational by September 2012.
At the same time, the UK is considering moving away from the Renewables Obligation Certificate support scheme it has used so far for wind energy, and implementing a Feed-In Tariff.
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Lost in the excitement of last week’s EWEA 2011 Annual Event in Brussels was a press release from the American Bird Conservancy noting that at least 500 million birds are killed in the US each year by cats.
A comparison of that figure to the 440,000 birds reportedly killed annually in the US by collisions with wind turbines surely must put into perspective the anti-wind lobby’s ardently exaggerated claim that birds are overly threatened by turbines.
That’s because the numbers tell the tale: In the US, each year wind turbines kill 0.088% of the birds killed by house cats.
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The problems caused by a lack of water are well documented – the difficulty of growing crops, of washing, of sheer survival in many areas of the world. Images of parched, cracked earth have become sadly familiar. Even in the affluent west, “water restrictions” are often put in place in the summer months to avoid a shortfall.
The global power sector is the largest industrial water user of all, yet this is chiefly due to water-guzzling fossil fuels and nuclear, while wind power uses less than nearly any other power generation technology, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) is emphasising on UN World Water Day (22 March). continue reading »
The negative impacts of offshore wind power can be avoided altogether or mitigated through proper planning, people attending a panel session at the EWEA2011 Annual Event heard Thursday.
Dan Wilhelmsson of the Swedish Secretariat for Environmental Earth System Sciences added that the offshore wind power sector can even be positive for the local marine environment.
Wilhelmsson said a recent report he and others produced for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources reviewed 32 different environmental issues associated with offshore wind and found eight required special attention.
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Transparency, administrative procedures of a known length and a low risk of changes to the legal framework are amongst the most crucial elements for emerging wind energy markets. That’s according to results from a study by Germany’s Sustainable Business Institute (SBI), presented on Tuesday at the EWEA 2011 Annual Event.
Christian Friebe, who presented the findings, said it was elements like these, which “don’t appear on cash flow statements”, that are as important as the financing side for wind power developers in emerging markets, defined as everything other than Europe, North America, India and China.
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