In 1887, Scottish engineer James Blyth turned a vision of lighting his remote Kincardineshire holiday cottage with wind power into reality using a ten-metre-tall canvas-sailed turbine set up in the garden. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that there would one day be nearly 500GW of wind turbines generating in more than 90 countries around the world — on track to reach 2,100GW by 2030.

Nine nations now have 10GW-plus fleets and another 29 have 1GW or more, according to the latest Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) figures. Wind power penetration in Denmark is pushing 40%, Uruguay, Portugal and Ireland 20%, Spain and Cyprus 20%, Germany 16% and Canada 6%, with market-leading China and the US getting 4% and 5.5%, respectively.

On the back of another year of doubledigit growth, GWEC forecasts an annual market of 75GW by 2021 as the build-out heads for 800GW. This is truly disruptive.

The worldwide diaspora of wind power, turbine by turbine, is visual evidence not only of the Energy Transition but also of the movement away from a global system based on centralised power production to one constructed around distributed renewable-energy sources.

This decentralisation is not confined to terra firma. Offshore wind — which the International Renewable Energy Agency sees generating 400GW “in the next three decades, at the heart of the post-COP22 decarbonisation push” — bucked the wider trend of slipping investment in renewables last year with $30bn in new capital buoying a global fleet that grew to 14.5GW.

And, taken in the context of wind’s total worldwide expansion, offshore is just leaving harbour. The portents look promising.

Leveraged on the magnitudinous scale-up of turbines towards 9MW models, costs are cratering. The UK met its government-set 2020 target of being sub-£100 ($128) per MWh four years early and the zero-subsidy awards in Germany’s flagship offshore wind auction presage a fast-approaching place as a mainstream energy. The advent of 10-15MW models next decade will only deepen the cost-reduction curve.

Floating wind power — thought to be a futurist’s folly a few short years ago — is now shifting up for industrialisation. The first large-scale arrays will soon be turning off Europe — two near Blyth’s cottage in northeast Scotland — while prospectors’ eyes are glinting with the multi-gigawatt seaborne potential off Asia and the US.

In the rich, high-altitude streams far above offshore wind farms, airborne wind energy systems will soon be flying too, backed by corporations including E.ON, Shell and Google.

Renewables are redrawing the world energy atlas, led by winds that are sweeping across geopolitical borders, creating a new industry with hundreds of thousands of jobs, and setting the pace in the global race to counter the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

For the wind power industry, facing challenges ahead that will doubtless be Herculean, it might pay dividends to revisit the words of the great American mass productionist Henry Ford — once retweeted by Donald J Trump: “Remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

Wind

From a Scottish cottage to 500GW worldwide, wind is on a historic updraft