You could title the week just ending in wind power A Tale of Three Cities as governments in London, Paris and Oslo made high-profile announcements on the sector prompting very different reactions.
In the UK, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) responded to a long-standing demand of the renewables sector when it said auctions for contract-for-difference power deals will be held annually from 2023, rather than every two years.
That should help giant offshore wind projects off British coasts keep up their momentum, in a move seen as vital to help hit Prime Minister Boris Johnson's 40GW by 2030 goal.
Vattenfall, one of the developers in line to benefit, had a second reason to applaud BEIS by Friday when it was granted consent for its 1.8GW Norfolk Vanguard project on the second bounce.
In France, meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron delivered what can only be described as a mixed bag for the renewables industry as he reeled-off a volley of energy policies to be enacted if he is re-elected. Offshore wind and solar will benefit from big new targets – albeit in the far-distant 2050 – but onshore wind will be a loser as Macron made a thinly-disguised move onto the territory of the far-right. There was also a massive vote of confidence for nuclear as a lynchpin of the French energy system.
Oslo never made it into a Charles Dickens novel, but while the Norwegian government’s latest offshore wind policy statement this week was not exactly the worst of times, it was certainly greeted with disappointment by the industry, set against the announced plan in 2020 to open 4.5GW to auction.
Plans for a first auction off the Norwegian south are now half the 3GW expected, and there was no mention of the 'remaining' gigawatts to be tender off the country's west coast, after an announcement the national wind association described “as better than standing still”.
The grid is looming ever larger as a make-or-break factor in President Joe Biden’s plans for a green US.
While wind and solar developers pile on gigawatts to their pipelines, a transmission system that can move all that power around has already this year been acknowledged as a critical issue by the Department of Energy.
As Recharge reported this week, that won’t come cheap, with California looking at a $30.5bn investment in high-voltage bulk transmission infrastructure by 2040, and that state’s future floating wind needs alone accounting for more than $8bn of necessary upgrades.
The urgency of the problem has prompted PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator, to come up with a comprehensive strategy designed to bring renewable projects through the planning pipeline faster and help to clear a massive 225GW backlog of projects, claiming it is taking steps to create the “grid of the future”.
From your kitchen to the stratosphere, Recharge has got hydrogen covered.
This week we brought news of a Seattle-based start-up backed by Bill Gates among others that wants customers to produce their own ‘turquoise hydrogen’ from natural gas and burn it to produce zero-carbon heat and power.
If that sounds worthy but a little dull, and you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, you could instead join the ‘Russian Elon Musk’ by investing in his plans to build a liquid-hydrogen-powered hypersonic rocket plane that would transport goods anywhere in the world within two hours.