Anyone who has ever visited Africa and witnessed the continent’s still grinding poverty and its poor access to electricity will be delighted by recent news that work should begin later this year on a 300-MW wind farm in Kenya.
Officials with the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP) said 365 wind turbines would eventually be erected in an arid region in the east African nation, which has a population of about 43 million people.
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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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“Wind farms are noisy.” “We can’t rely on wind because it is intermittent.” “Wind farms are dangerous to human health.” “Wind doesn’t work – wind farms are inefficient as they are only operational 30% of the time.”
These are some of the myths of wind energy that are thoroughly debunked by a new website set up by British Wind at www.british-wind.co.uk. The sentiments above are the type of ill-conceived, badly-informed ideas on wind energy that newspaper readers are subjected to with increasing frequency in the British media.
A new study is being greeted excitedly in India as it shows the potential for onshore wind energy in India is up to 30 times greater than previous government estimates.
The study, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, has found that the country’s total wind potential ranges from 2,006 gigawatts (GW) for 80 metre hub heights to 3,121 GW for 120 metre hub heights.
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.
