The integration of increasing shares of renewable energy into electricity grids is getting easier and cheaper, says WindEurope. Smart grids, demand response, flexible wind turbines and storage are helping to do this. If renewables are to meet 35% of Europe’s energy needs by 2030, then investments in electricity grids need to be more strategic.
The Global Wind Energy Council released its annual market statistics. The 2017 market remained above 50 GW, with Europe, India and the offshore sector having record years. Chinese installations were down slightly - 'only' 19.5 GW - but the rest of the world made up for most of that. Total installations in 2017 were 52,573 MW, bringing the global total to 539,581 MW.
Few large investors dominated the German wind auctions in 2017, while local community wind projects, so far drivers of the market, will hardly play a role any longer, without major changes to the regulations. The rules which were set up by the German government to protect community energy investors have failed to achieve this goal.
A new report from The Renewables Consulting Group (RCG), and cybersecurity company, Cylance , provides insight into cybersecurity for the renewable energy industry, focusing on threat and impact assessment, and on measures to improve cyber protection.
Europe added a record 15.7GW of new wind energy capacity in 2017, according to WindEurope’s annual onshore and offshore wind statistics. New wind farm installations were up 20% on 2016 and beat the previous 2015 record of 12.8GW. Onshore wind capacity grew by 12.5 and offshore wind by 3.1GW.
The overall capacity of all wind turbines installed worldwide by the end of 2017 reached 539,291MW, according to preliminary statistics published by WWEA. 52,552MW were added in the year 2017, slightly more than in 2016 when 51,402MW went online. This is the third largest number ever installed within one year, after the record years 2015 and 2014. However, the annual growth rate of only 10,8 % is the lowest growth ever since the industrial deployment of wind turbines started end of the 20th century.
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