Ireland increases it's Wind Power Capacity by 50% in 2006, Europe by 23%

international | environment | other press Tuesday February 06, 2007 11:24 by Terence - None

It's still not enough to counteract our recent rise in CO-2 emissions.

According to the latest statistics released by the European Wind Energy Association www.ewea.org, Ireland's wind power capacity increased by 50% last year bringing us from 495 MW (megawatts) to 745 MW. Meanwhile for Europe as a whole, new records were broken again and capacity installed for last year by 23% or 7,588 MW over the 2005 figure. Cumulatively total capacity increased by 19% with the total for Europe now over 48,000 MW.

One of the Wind Turbines at Cahore Point in Co. Wexford

Europe accounts for more than 50% of World capacity and is way ahead of the USA. In recent years, the top three countries Germany, Spain and Denmark accounted for much of the growth but this growth is now spreading to a wider group that includes the UK, France, Portugal, Ireland, Netherlands and Austria.

Quoting from the report:

‘Excluding the three pioneering countries – Germany, Spain and Denmark - we have experienced a six-fold increase in the annual market in four years. The figures clearly confirm that a second wave of European countries is investing in wind power. We are now witnessing the strong effect of the EU Renewable Electricity Directive passed in 2001 and, once again, urge the European Commission and the Council to introduce safeguard measures that ensure legal stability for renewable electricity in Europe...

..With 2,233 MW installed during 2006, a 23% increase compared to 2005, Germany passed the 20,000 MW mark.

Spain was the second largest market in 2006, with 1,587 MW. France moved up to third place in 2006 (from sixth place in 2005), with 810 MW installed during the year - more capacity than has previously been commissioned in the entire history of the French market. This reflects increasing success by developers in getting their projects off the ground.

Once again, Portugal performed well, with 694 MW of new capacity, more than in any previous year. With a further 1,063 MW already under construction, according to the research institute INEGI, the Portuguese market should be well on the way to meeting the government target of more than 3,750 MW by 2010.

With 634 MW installed in 2006, the UK also had another record year. Total installed capacity increased by 47%, taking one of Europe’s windiest countries close to 2,000 MW. The Italian market continued to perform well, with a further 417 MW installed, whilst Ireland set a new record with 250 MW, increasing its total capacity by 50%.


But without knowing what these figures mean they begin to sound like Soviet era announcements of annual grain harvest statistics, so I will atempt to put this in perspective.

Firstly in relation to Ireland, our electrical capacity is about 4,500 MW. So with a wind capacity now standing at 745 MW, this would suggest 16.5% of our energy is now from wind. But not quite so, because what is called the utility factor for wind power is much lower than others forms of power generaton. For coal, gas, oil, nuclear, you can probably run these for around 70 to 90% of the time, depending on demand and maintenance. For wind, the average utilty factor has only be around 26% although some sites will be better than others. This is because of two factors. One is that the wind does now blow all the time. In fact it is about half the time and the other is that it does not blow hard enough to all the time that it is windy for the wind turbine to output at the maximum power that it is designed for. Obviously we have light, moderate and strong winds. And the amount of power in wind is proportional to the wind speed cubed. So basically as the winds slacken the amount of power drops off dramatically. So the net effect is that for wind power, 1 MW of capacity is not the same as 1 MW of say coal capacity. You probably need to build somewhere between double and trible the amount of capacity of wind to replace the same given amount for other forms of power generaton. So the average amount of wind powered electricity in Ireland is probably somewhere between 7 to 10%, where on the best days this can rise to 16% or so while on others it will essentially fall to nothing.

And according to the EWEA press release, overall for Europe, last years capacity increases are reckoned to produce approximately 100 Twh (Terrawatt hours) of electricity, equal to 3.3% of Europe's total electrical consumption. In fact this figure can be calculated as follows.

365 days x 24 hours x 25% utilty factor x 48,000 MW (total Europe capacity) = 105,120,000 = 105 TWh (Note: 1 TWh = 1,000,000 MWh)

What this 3.3% figure hides is the fact that this figure is actually a good deal higher for the top wind power countries in Europe: Germany (20,000 MW), Spain (11,615 MW) and Denmark (3,136 MW) and a lot lower for many other countries like Belgium (193 MW), Finland (86 MW) and especially the East European ones with the net effect of driving down the average. The good news is that all of these are beginning to show signs of springing into life and following the leads of the pioneers.

For reference it is worth remembering that a typical modern nuclear plant is usually built with a capacity of 1000 MW and a typical coal plant being anywhere from 500 MW to 1000 MW. And at the end of 2003 the Europe total installed capacity for all forms of electrical power was 656,000 MW which has probably increased a bit since then. Taking the 48,000 MW for Wind this is about 7%, but utility factor as we know means the wind power capacity is effectively half or more, which brings the 7% down to around 3% which agrees reasonably well with the figure above.

In summary what this report confirms is that wind power is growing rapidly, more countries are getting involved, it's making a difference, but the overall capacity is still low in absolute figures compared to what is there. Yet the targets set many years ago for 2010 have been exceeded and raised at least twice in the past. It also shows that legislation like EU Renewable Energy Directive 2001 really do make a difference. On the negative side there have been reports of fairly rampant specualation in some areas with wind parks being developed in unsuitable areas and suffering low utility factors because of bad sites and insufficient wind.

The press release can be found at the URL below