With unconventional beauty, wind turbines adorn many views across Europe. Proudly towering over everything around them, they feed our power grids with 468 Gw of electricity (At the end of 2015). With technological advances, Europes wind power sector can now utilise weaker winds, increasing the importance of wind energy to the global economy.
The JRC Wind Energy Status Report - 2016, states that rotor blades now have an average diameter of 100 metres, 45 metres more than a decade ago. The towers are an average of 85 meters, but can also be found at 100 metres tall and offshore wind farms are being built in even deeper waters.
The EU is taking advantage of the power of the wind and since 2010 have added 10-13 gigawatts of wind energy every year. The report suggests that because of the rapid development of offshore wind power, the expansion is set to reach 15 gigawatts a year. Currently, 90% of all newly completed win projects are offshore in the EU. These are mainly focussed in the UK, Germany and Denmark. All of the EU’s 140 GM of wind energy capacity, which is about one third of the global capacity, is connected to the grid, which means Europe is a global leader in supplying wind energy.
As the EU focus more and more on Wind energy, and renewable energy in general, there is more investment into the development of new technologies, which make renewable energy more and more sustainable and profitable. This is a huge advantage for firms like Sunfire, that create e-synthetic fuels, using renewable energy. More efficient renewable energy production means that the prices of these fuels will reduce, making them even more attractive to the consumer. E-synthetic fuels, which have no need for fossil fuels, are already competitively priced, but with the advancement of their technology, as well as renewable energy technology, costs are set to drop.
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