By Julian Singer After some recent problems, doubts have been raised about the Contract for Difference method of encouraging renewable energy investment. Last year the owners of two new windfarms, Triton Knoll and Moray East, both delayed declaring that their projects were commercial at a time when open market prices were much higher than the [...]
By Julian Singer In June the Crown Estate updated its listing of offshore UK wind farms to show 13.7GW fully commissioned projects and a further 65GW committed or under development and pre-planning. A further 9.7GW has been announced. This potential capacity of 88.4GW in offshore wind alone should produce slightly more than the total UK [...]
By Julian Singer Sea Twirl is a Swedish company with a novel approach to floating offshore wind farms. The basic idea is to use a vertical axis wind turbine rather than the more conventional horizontal axis. Small versions of the vertical axis wind turbine are occasionally seen on the roofs of buildings. The Sea Twirl [...]
By Julian Singer On 25 May Scottish and Southern Electricity (SSE) reported preliminary results for its financial year ending 31 March 2022. Earnings before interest and tax, or operating profit, were up at £1.5bn (2021: 1.3bn) with earnings per share up at 95.4p (2021: 78.4p). These results exclude revenue from its one third stake in [...]
By Julian Singer The British Energy Security Strategy issued by the government on 7 April set a new goal of 50GW of offshore wind, including 5GW of floating wind, by 2030. Many doubt whether this is feasible. There is currently 11GW operational with a further 2GW expected to come on line in 2022 from the [...]
By Barney Smith Monday 4 April saw the release of the seventeenth annual report by the Global World Energy Council (GWEC), which is the most widely used source of data on the wind energy sector for industry, governments and others. At the industry level, the report paints an impressive picture, showing that in 2021 total global capacity rose by [...]
By Julian Singer While most of us were enjoying a few days of sun in the middle of last week, the electricity grid controllers in Wokingham were sweating with anxiety. The same weather conditions that had brought the sun also brought very still conditions. Wind power output dropped to near zero, after been well below [...]
By Barney Smith The Prime Minister’s ten-point blue-print for a “Green Industrial Revolution”, released in November 2020, included the following extract (from Point 1), which also incidentally contains the firmest commitment in the whole plan viz:- “And by 2030, we aim to produce 40GW of offshore wind, including 1GW of innovative floating offshore wind in [...]
By Julian Singer GWEC India presented its annual report on the Indian wind market on 10 June 2021. India is ranked 4th in terms of world wind power capacity, with 39.2GW installed as of March 2021, all onshore. This, however, is far from the current goal of reaching 450GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030, [...]
By Julian Singer The UK’s drive to reach net zero emissions depends hugely on affordable offshore wind energy. In the most recent auction of Contacts for Difference (CfD) in September 2019 the strike prices of the successful bids were around £40 per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity, well below the government’s guideline price for wholesale electricity [...]