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For the first time ever the European Parliament has voted to create a dedicated budget line for wind energy research and development. Following today's vote, wind energy R&D should have its own 'symbolic' 1 million Euros EU budget line for 2012. "With this vote, the Parliament recognises that wind energy R&D needs its own budget line. It reinforces the value that investing in wind energy has to society in driving down the costs of a secure, reliable renewable energy system with huge job creation prospects."

"The decision has huge symbolic meaning. It creates a precedent for a dedicated financial allocation to wind energy R&D in the EU's 2014 - 2020 multi-annual financial framework", said Vilma Radvilaite, the European Wind Energy Association's Regulatory Affairs Advisor.

"We hope the EU will now go forward with its support for wind energy R&D and allocate a total of 1.3 billion Euros from 2014 - 2020 in its proposal for the multi-annual financial framework ", Radvilaite said.

During the current multi-annual framework wind energy R&D has been allocated around 20 million Euros under FP7 and 565 million Euros under the European Energy Programme for Recovery. The 'symbolic'  1 million Euros EU budget line for 2012 for wind energy R&D  would be in addition to approximately 24 million Euros that should be allocated to wind energy research in 2012 under the FP7 Programme.

Source: EWEA

The new Danish centre-left coalition government has increased targets on wind capacity. Wind power is set to represent 50 percent of the total power consumption in Denmark in 2020.

Denmark is already close to meeting its EU 2020 target of 31% electricity from renewables as the Danish pioneers reached a total installed capacity of 3,8 GW wind power last year, representing 25% of the country's electricity demand. The new Danish government just recently released its targets on renewable energy and CO2 emissions. The new disposition increases the previous CO2 reduction target from 30 to 40 percent, measured relative to 1990.

"A green and more sustainable world does not evolve by itself," says Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt at the Global Green Growth Forum in Copenhagen on the 11th of October.

As a part of the increased ambitions on CO2 emissions, wind power is targeted to represent 50 percent of the total power consumption in Denmark in 2020. The major role of wind power should be seen as a part of the government's plan to phase out fossil fuels by 2050. The ambitious targets place Denmark in pole position on renewables among the developed countries.

Source : DWIA

New results on offshore electricity grid infrastructure in Europe: the EU "OffshoreGrid" project analysis reveals tremendous cost saving potential. Report published in Brussels today.

Offshore grids, connecting North and Baltic Sea wind farms to electricity consumers, will be substantially cheaper to build than expected. Building "hub connections" at sea instead of using cables to connect single wind farms individually to the shore will result in investment costs that are 14 billion Euros lower. Additionally if these hub connections were combined with an even more interconnected "meshed grid", the necessary additional costs of 5 to 7 billion Euros would be compensated by 16 to 21 billion Euros of additional benefits over 25 years of grid operation.

Vienna, Austria -- The profitability of wind generation is dependent upon the design. If your wind farm is not designed to maximise available generation and minimise operating costs, chances are your wind farm will hemorrhage cash and profits for as long as you own it. However, the weak link in most designs is often not the turbine but the transformer.

Choosing the right transformer can increase sales by as much as 17 MWh annually for a 1.5-MW turbine, depending upon wind conditions. Operating costs can be reduced by as much as $2,800 per turbine annually in avoided backup power costs for periods when there is no wind. Losses can be substantially more if low first cost is the dominant consideration. In regions such as California, for example, where the generation from wind is 22 percent of rated capacity, a turbine will be idle 50 percent of the time.

Most wind advocates, including both industry players and regional renewable energy organizations, continue to be in a state of disbelief that the noise of turbines could possibly be a significant issue for nearby neighbors.

While it's increasingly acknowledged that turbines will be audible much of the time, complaints about noise are too often painted as being unworthy of serious consideration, either because turbines are not all that loud, or because of an insistence that noise complaints are bogus surrogates for a broader opposition to wind energy that is "really" based on visual impacts or economic arguments (driven in some cases by climate change denial). Perhaps most crucially, wind advocates rarely acknowledge that turbine noise is often 10 dB louder than background sound levels (sometimes even 20 dB or more); acousticians have long known that any increase over 5 dB begins to trigger complaints, with 10dB the threshold for widespread problems.