UK wind power industry set to boom

Funding, plans and findings to boost the wind power industryBritain’s offshore potential gets most of the attention paid to wind in the Government’s latest renewable energy strategy [see 'First cut']. But there’s also a welcome boost for land-based wind projects held up by the credit crunch. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband announced £1 billion of loans to wind farm developers, organised through the partly state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and the European Investment Bank.

The aim is to get one gigawatt of new schemes up and running. Local hostility to wind farm planning applications – probably the biggest obstacle to a more dynamic UK market – could also be tempered, given Miliband’s emphasis on “finding new ways of working with local communities… to persuade people that we need a significant increase in onshore wind”.

Away from the UK, the boom in wind power has been driving job growth in the sector. The month after announcing its Isle of Wight factory closure, turbine maker Vestas hired thousands of new workers in China and the US to supply the fast-growing domestic markets in those countries.

Sub-saharan Africa is also getting in on the act. The whole continent had just 593MW of installed wind capacity at the end of 2008, most of it in the north where Egypt and Morocco have ambitious expansion plans. But Ethiopia and Tanzania have major projects commissioned or in the pipeline. And the continent’s biggest wind farm, at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, should generate 300MW – a quarter of that country’s total current installed generating capacity – when completed in 2012.– Roger East