EUROPEAN DIARY:THE WIND farm is barely visible as we sail out of IJmuiden port. It is a cloudy, grey day on the Dutch coast and all that can be seen on the horizon is a cluster of stick-like white objects far off in the distance. It takes an hour before the 60 white turbines come clearly into view, each bearing a huge rotor that circulates slowly as it catches the breeze.
“This is the future,” says Justin Wilkes of the European Wind Energy Association, pointing to the Princess Amelia wind farm, which became operational in the summer. “We won’t be able to combat climate change unless we build offshore wind turbines. Gas prices are unpredictable, nuclear takes 10 years to build and wind offers price stability.”
The 60 turbines located 23km off the Dutch coast generate enough electricity to power 125,000 homes. A typical power station would pump out 225,000 tonnes of CO2 a year to match that. And with EU states facing binding targets to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, many governments are turning to offshore wind power.
“There is pressure on land in most European countries and many have already built as many onshore wind farms as they can fit or would be acceptable to the public,” says Wilkes.
Five EU states have already invested in offshore wind farms: Denmark, Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland, where seven turbines stand off the Arklow coast. Germany, France and Belgium began building their first offshore wind farms earlier this year.
The Princess Amelia wind farm is located further from the shore than any other existing facility to minimise the impact on people living in coastal communities.There is also more wind offshore, boosting efficiency. But it is expensive. It cost €385 million to build Princess Amelia, double the cost of a similar onshore farm.
“We raised 70 per cent of the cash from banks for the investment. It was a long process that took many meetings and negotiations,” says Albert van der Hem, senior engineer at Evelop, the firm that built the farm. “But we wanted to do it in an entrepreneurial way.”
Evelop teamed up with the electricity company Eneco on the Princess Amelia project, which has agreed a deal to buy electricity from the farm over a 10-year period. The government has also promoted the development by paying a subsidy worth some €97 per megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity over 10 years. Evelop had to pay the grid connection costs but there was no resistance from the national grid company.
“The grid connection was an easy ride compared to other projects I’ve worked on. The grid firms are more familiar with offshore projects than three or four years ago,” says van der Hem.
The Dutch government is a strong advocate of offshore wind energy and has also helped to support an offshore wind farm near the Princess Amelia.
Other offshore wind farms are also at the planning phase as the Netherlands aggressively moves to try and cut its domestic carbon dioxide emissions to help combat climate change.
Back in Ireland some wind energy advocates say progress has been painfully slow due to an anti-wind culture at play in the dominant player ESB and in the regulator’s office.
Founder of Airtricity Eddie O’Connor, who developed the Arklow project, says he exited the Irish offshore market due to the slow progress.
“We constructed the Arklow project entirely through the private sector but I left the market in disgust. At one point the regulator banned putting more wind onto the grid. That just hadn’t happened in any other country,” says O’Connor, who recently sold Airtricity for more than €1 billion.
With Irish CO2 emissions still rising, he says there is a real need for the Government to invest in offshore wind technology.
There is a risk, says O’Connor, that taxpayers will pay huge fines for breaching Ireland’s climate change targets when the cash could have been invested in developing expertise that could have been exported later for a fee.
But Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan, a strong advocate of renewable power, has begun to push offshore wind energy. In February he announced a new State support scheme for offshore wind that offers a guaranteed price of €140 per MWh, which is in line with a similar support scheme in Germany.
There has been strong interest from the private sector with an estimated 3,000MW of offshore applications already submitted – the vast majority for sites in the Irish Sea where sandbanks offer good sites for turbines.
“There are applications for farms all down the east coast from Louth to Wexford,” says Michael Walsh, chief executive of the Irish Wind Energy Association, who notes the future could be bright for the sector in Ireland if certain problems can be dealt with.
“It takes five or six years for applications to be processed; the State aid scheme has not yet been sanctioned by Brussels; connection to the grid remains an issue; and foreshore licences can be problematic,” says Walsh.
As we sail back to IJmuiden port, Evelop’s van der Hem says the Princess Amelia farm won’t be the company’s last and talks about developing a North Sea grid for offshore wind farms. “But offshore is not just the future, it’s here already,” he adds.