By Julian Singer Two well-known facts about offshore wind turbines are that they are getting bigger and that the price of the electricity they produce is getting less. Some climate sceptics have doubted that the installers will be able to operate at the prices tendered and that the wind farms will never be built. On [...]

By Barney Smith India is the world’s second-largest hub for the manufacture of turbines and the fourth-largest onshore wind market by installations. By 2019, 37.5 GW of wind capacity had been installed. Yet in that year, only 2.3 GW of capacity was added. Why?  To some extent, this comes on top of what was already [...]

By Barney Smith Early on 25 March 2020 saw the release of the fifteenth Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) report for 2019, almost a year since Greenbarrel reported the release of the GWEC report for 2018 in rather more settled times.  The report is the most widely used source of data on the wind energy [...]

The IEA predicts a bright future for the offshore wind industry but there is a problem: wind farms fixed to the sea floor are not yet commercially viable in water depths above 50-60 metres. The southern North Sea, for example, is generally shallower than this but the northern part is not. Floating wind farms are [...]

There are two important facts about off-shore wind: the first is that the UK is the world leader, with more installed capacity than any other country; the second is that global off-shore wind capacity currently only represents 0.3 per cent of all the electricity generating capacity in the world. What is new and important is [...]

It is well known that wind speed increases with distance above the ground. Since the power in the wind varies with the cube of the wind speed there is clearly a strong incentive to capture the energy in the wind from as high in the air as possible, which is why wind farms are built [...]

As previously foreshadowed (Greenbarrel  6 March) the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) duly released its full Annual Report on 3 April 2019. The Report is the most widely used source of data on the wind energy sector for industry, governments and others. This was the fourteenth Annual report and the presentation has been wholly redesigned.  [...]

At the end of February 2019, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) released some figures for increases in wind power during 2018. (This was in advance of the release of the full annual report on 3 April) The overall increase in new installed capacity, (51.3 GW) though in line with the average figure for the [...]

A new attraction has been added to the Sussex coast in southern England along with the beaches, the wonderfully renovated pier in Worthing and the not so wonderful British Airways i360 531-foot observation platform at the landward end of the now broken-down West Pier in Brighton. Eight and a half miles off the Sussex coast, [...]

While wind power in general is seen as environmentally desirable in terms of the planet and emission reduction, it comes with a significant price, paid by birds and bats, species which are also of concern to environmentalists. For there are numerous fatal collisions between birds, bats and wind turbine blades. It is to be hoped [...]