The importance to renewable energy investors of policymakers providing visibility and certainty was on full view on the Recharge site this week – on the positive as well as negative sides of the coin.
On the upside, the momentum behind the US offshore wind sector shows no signs of slowing, and this week’s setting of 6 December as the date for California’s eagerly awaited 4.5GW floating leasing round opens a whole new coast on America’s west to developers that share President Joe Biden’s ambitions for the industry.
While not without its challenges, the US sector has now “graduated to a global stage” with more than 77GW of state offshore wind targets in place, according to advocacy group the Business Network for Offshore Wind, while after five years of efforts, the American industry now has its first set of standards covering the “cradle to grave” lifecycle of development.
Policymakers can put rockets behind a sector but they can just as easily cause jitters, as shown in Germany where the renewables industry is furious over proposals for a windfall tax that it says borders on the unconstitutional.
If German policy is causing furrowed brows, it is as nothing compared to the groans of despair in the UK where the disastrous 44-day rule of Prime Minister Liz Truss came to an undignified end. She departs after a bungled policy agenda that almost managed to blow up the British economy and, for good measure, leave renewable energy generators wondering why they were facing a windfall tax from a Prime Minister who declared herself opposed to investment-deterring measures against oil & gas firms.
Big is beautiful in green power
Whether it is as a project developer, technical innovator, or even – dare we say it – a journalist, immersion in the day-to-day business of the renewables industry can cause a tendency to overlook the sheer ambitious scale of energy transition projects underway around the world. A glance at the Recharge website this week should restore that perspective.
We’ll start in the UK, where The Banks Group unveiled plans to turn a long-disused coal power plant into one of the world’s largest battery storage facilities at up to 2.8GWh, taking offshore wind power from North Sea projects and helping smooth its path onto the grid.
Now to the Middle East, where oil supermajor TotalEnergies cut the ribbon on its 800MW Al Kharsaah solar plant, the size of 1,400 football pitches and able to provide 10% of Qatar’s peak power needs.
Australia regularly adds to the global roll call of epic renewable energy schemes and this week was no exception, this time in the form of the multi-gigawatt Blue Marlin offshore wind project that hopes to provide a fifth of the power needs of the state of Victoria.
All hail Hydrogen Insight
Recharge’s newly launched sister title, Hydrogen Insight, continued to set the H2 agenda this week, with exclusive news on how oil giant Shell has quietly closed down its UK hydrogen filling stations, and the CEO of auto giant BMW declaring that fuel-cell vehicles will be “the hippest to drive”.
