By Julian Singer The UK may have the largest offshore wind capacity in the world, but little of it is operated by UK companies. It is well known that most of the equipment and technology for wind farms comes from non-UK firms. What may be less well known is that, according to the Crown Estate, [...]

By Barney Smith Thursday 25 March 2021 saw the release of the sixteenth annual report by the Global World Energy Council (GWEC) . The title “Wind Energy’s role on the road to Net Zero” shows that Climate Change is back on the agenda, and  the report also notes the trend for countries to announce net [...]

By Julian Singer As discussed in theGreenbarrel article of January 14, the recent government energy white paper restates the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan of reaching an offshore wind capacity of 40GW by 2030. What is the chance of achieving this? There are many steps in constructing an offshore wind farm. The process starts with the Crown [...]

By Julian Singer Floating offshore wind turbines are starting to receive a lot of publicity, but people have been working on them for some time. According to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) small-scale tests were being performed in the 1990’s. They have much in common with offshore oil field platforms, so it is not [...]

By Julian Singer During the 2020 monsoon the power output from India’s wind turbines was reported to be 30 to 40 per cent below that expected[1]. This is important because seventy per cent of India’s annual wind power is normally generated during this season, which runs from June to September. It is also surprising because [...]

By Julian Singer As discussed in a previous article (Greenbarrel, 13 October), the Prime Minister’s recent commitment to offshore wind has been welcomed by a wide range of business and environmental leaders, albeit with comments as to how the target will be achieved. Perhaps inevitably given the PM’s preference for dreams, some of the claims [...]

By Barney Smith In the midst of his otherwise vacuous speech to the Conservative party conference Boris Johnson made an important policy pledge on electricity generation from renewables, saying that by 2030 off-shore wind would be providing electricity for every house in the country, with the target being raised from 30GW to 40 GW by [...]

By Barney Smith One of the Renewables’ success stories is undoubtedly off-shore wind, on which the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), has just issued an interesting report. This shows that off-shore wind has grown from 1 per cent of global wind installation by capacity ten years ago (2009) to 10 per cent last year (2019). [...]

By Barney Smith TPI Composites makes composite blades for wind turbines, just the blades, not the whole turbine. It claims it is the only “ US-based independent manufacturer of composite wind blades with a global footprint”. The company’s headquarters are in Scottsdale, Arizona and it operates factories in the U.S., China, Mexico, Turkey and India –global [...]

By Barney Smith Earlier this week, GWEC released its supply-side analysis for windpower for 2019. Supply-side means that the data refers to the total capacity of wind turbines installed based on wind turbine manufacturers figures. (Demand-side data refers to total capacity connected to the Grid and is used, eg in GWEC’s analysis of windpower  in [...]