In December, chief executives from all major power companies in Europe committed to achieving a carbon-neutral electricity mix in the EU “well before 2050” under a Eurelectric initiative.
Asia’s largest offshore wind farm, the 302MW Rudong Baxianjiao project, was commissioned off Jiangsu province, China, in October by power giant Huaneng — while another 4GW of Chinese offshore projects are now under construction.
A few days later, also in October, Taiwan announced it was increasing its offshore wind target from 3GW to 5.5GW by 2025. Orsted has 2.4GW of approved projects off Taiwan.
Africa’s largest wind farm, the remote 310MW Lake Turkana project in Kenya, was completed ahead of schedule by Vestas in June, but the 428km transmission link to connect it to the national grid is not now due to be completed until this year.
Two-bladed offshore wind pioneer Seawind landed a breakout deal in November to build fixed-bottom and floating arrays of 50-100MW to power islands in Greece’s Aegean Sea. A 6.2MW two-blade prototype is due to be installed off Norway this year. Seawind chief executive Martin Jakubowski’s column for Recharge in March, which declared that two-blade machines could halve the cost of offshore wind energy, was our fifth most-read story online in 2017.
China unveiled the world’s largest carbon market in December — initially for 1,700 power-generation companies when it starts up in 2019 — with plans to add 7,000 heavy industrial companies at a later date. It will cover 3.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year initially — which would immediately make it larger than the 1.95 billion tonnes in the EU’s Energy Trading System (ETS).
In November, the European Parliament and Council agreed to reform the ETS, speeding up the reduction of the current oversupply of allowances. A strengthened ETS would make it more expensive for utilities and industry to emit CO₂, thereby speeding up the transition to clean energy. But the move was criticised as not being enough for the EU to meet its Paris Agreement pledges.
The corporate renewables sector continued to grow rapidly in 2017, with Google and Lego both announcing that they are now 100% powered by clean energy, and Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Kellogg’s and Vestas among companies that last year pledged to do the same.

The most important moments of 2017