Alsleben's new wind farm is designed to supply electricity to 30,000 homes, but when the wind stops blowing, the blades stop turning and the power output falls to zero. Critics say this underlines one essential drawback: you can't depend on wind for energy. Even if you build wind farms you still need conventional power plants in case the wind fails. "We face many hours a year with more or less no wind," says Martin Fuchs, chief executive of one of Germany's biggest electricity grid operators, E.On Netz. "We can save only a very small number of conventional power stations." Surges of wind-generated electricity risk overloading the grid, he adds, causing power blackouts. These are charges the wind power industry robustly rejects. Christian Kjaer, of the European Wind Energy Association, says all electricity grids are designed to cope with power fluctuations. "Fossil fuel or nuclear power stations are truly intermittent," he argues. "You never see 1000 megawatts of wind energy shutting down in a second, yet that's what conventional power stations do." For now, few in Germany are questioning the country's wind energy programme. The savings in terms of greenhouse gas emissions are politically popular. Yet there is a lingering question-mark over the cost of all this, and whether building so many wind turbines truly makes economic sense.

Editor's Note: Originally published 5/28/06

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said renewable energies could meet around 16 percent of total energy supply by 2020 — triple the current amount. At a presentation of a study on expanding renewable energies in Berlin on Tuesday, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said such an expansion of renewable energy sources would not be difficult and has “great potential” for providing jobs. Gabriel said the alternative energies would be a “major success story. He added that the production of electricity, heat and fuels from renewable sources such as wind, biomass and solar power increased 12.8 percent in 2006 and that renewable sources now make up 5.3 percent of the energy supply. Electricity from renewable sources has a 11.8 percent share. Such expansion would gradually allow Germany to replace nuclear energy with renewables, Gabriel said. Rapid growth has also led to 50,000 new jobs in the sector since 2004 — with a current total of 214,000 in the branch. The German Space Center conducted the study for the German Environment Ministry.

Clare County Council has approved the seventh wind farm in the county despite some local opposition. This follows German company Pro Ventum securing planning permission for a €10 million six-turbine wind farm at Tullabrack near Kilrush. It is the second wind farm that the company has secured permission for in the west Clare area and the previous proposal also faced opposition. Currently there are two wind farms operational in the county - the Pro Ventum wind farm at Monmore and the second 11-turbine wind farm near Connolly in mid-Clare.

High wind-power production in Germany one Saturday night helped extend a blackout across Europe. Last month, the Conservative government joined the long line of governments around the world subsidizing the production of wind power. Meanwhile, new information about wind power from Europe raises the spectre of unexpected blackout risks, high costs, unreliable production and even questionable environmental benefits. Concerns over wind power used to focus on whether enough wind would blow to keep wind generators busy and electric power grids supplied. Now, after a major power blackout in Europe in November that left 15 million households in the dark, concerns over wind power come from an entirely opposite direction – fear that wind power can unpredictably produce more power than a system can handle.

Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, governments around the world have paid plenty of lip service to renewable energies such as wind and solar power. But only a few governments have been able to engineer policies that have begun to bring alternative energies into wider use. Renewable fuels provided 18% of the world’s total electricity supply in 2004, according to figures from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization. Almost all of that, though, came from hydropower, a source with limited growth potential because of geographic constraints. The use of wind and solar power is growing, but they still generated only 1% of global electricity production in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available.

World leader in terms of installed capacity is Germany (20,621 MW), followed by Spain (11,615 MW), the USA (11,603 MW), India (6,270 MW) and Denmark (3,136 MW). According to Peter Ahmels, President of the German Wind Energy Association, the secret of Germany’s fast growing wind energy market lies in the feed-in system with fixed prices for 20 years: “So investors know exactly what they get. Compared to several other systems in Europe, the German feed-in law is one of the cheapest.” Christian Schnibbe of Wind Project Development adds: “Due to a reliable and sustainable basis of the Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz (Renewable Energy Law in Germany, ed.) and a growing industry, wind has become mainstream. In addition, the growing international demand for renewable energy has also pushed the development in Germany.”

Deep-water wind farms will top the agenda when U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., leads a congressional delegation to Germany this spring. The trip will involve discussions of a variety of energy issues, said Delahunt, chairman of the bipartisan study group that includes current and former members of Congress. But of particular interest to Delahunt, who represents Cape Cod and the Islands, are German renewable energy companies - including one involved in building a test deep-water wind farm off the German coast in the North Sea. Some of the companies in this project ‘’are beginning to talk about a need for American subsidiaries,'’ Delahunt said. ‘’What better place than Massachusetts for this kind of foreign investment? Wind is to the Northeast, what oil is to Saudi Arabia,'’ he said.

DeWind Inc., a subsidiary of Irvine, Calif.-based Composite Technology Corp. (CTC), has completed the construction of the 2 MW DeWind D8.2 wind turbine at an offshore testing site in Cuxhaven, Germany.

The German utility company EON has unveiled plans to build a wind farm off the Scottish coast, which it said would be the biggest UK installation of its kind, with an aggregate capacity of 180 megawatts. The 338 million pound investment, which is expected to become operational in the spring of 2009, will produce 550 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

The Renewable Energy Foundation is claiming that uncontrolled renewable energy in the form of wind power was a key factor in the grid disturbance and blackout that affected millions in Europe. They write: ‘ Europe’s principal grid authority the “Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity” (UCTE) has published a detailed interim report into the grid disturbance that left 15 million households without power, and came close to resulting in a pan-European blackout. The report reveals that the causes of the event were multi-factorial, but that the key trigger was an unexpected rise in the load on the Landesbergen-Wehrendorf grid link, which joins the grid control areas of E.ON Netz and RWE. The precise causes of this increase are at present not clear, or have not yet been published, but the role of an unpredicted rise in wind generation (documented by E.ON Netz) appears to be a potentially important feature.

After killing nuclear energy and coal-fired power plants, Germany is now taking aim at its own green policies, says the Wall Street Journal. After building nearly 20,000 windmills, Germans are now regulating them well beyond economical sense:

E.ON is planning to build a large offshore wind farm in the North Sea. This was announced by the company today at the 5th Maritime Conference of the German Environment Ministry in Hamburg. The wind farm will be built roughly 40 kilometers (approx. 25 miles) to the northwest of the East Frisian island of Juist. To this end, E.ON has now taken over the Offshore Wind Park Delta North Sea project from the Enova Group. The sea area selected has already been designated as particularly suitable for this purpose by the Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie (BSH – German Federal Agency of Maritime Shipping and Hydrography).

A group of four European energy companies on Friday revealed plans for a subsea electricity cable to bring more power from Germany to Norway from 2011. The 700 megawatt (MW) cable which would boost power flows between continental Europe and the hydropower reliant Nordic region would cost 500 million euros (USD 659.8 million), the consortium said in a statement issued in Germany. The cost would be shared equally by Agder Energi and Lyse of Norway, EGL of Switzerland, and northern German utility EWE, a spokeswoman for EWE said.

The German government and the country’s energy companies have launched a massive joint offshore wind park project aimed at overcoming the source’s technical insecurities. Last month, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel gave the green light to build the first German offshore wind energy test park in the North Sea.

German wind turbine maker Repower is considering setting up a U.S. subsidiary to tap the fast-growing market and expects further U.S. deals in the next two years, its chief executive said on Tuesday. “We have got subsidiaries all over the world except the United States. We are currently looking into the possibility of setting one up there. We need to be represented in the United States,” Fritz Vahrenholt told Reuters.

“There's legitimate debate about a couple of segments,” says Keith Raab, boss of Cleantech Venture Network. In some instances, valuations accorded to firms with no profits—and little chance of making any soon—were reminiscent of the excesses of the dotcom bubble. As Douglas Lloyd, of Venture Business Research, puts it, “There's too much money chasing too few opportunities. How is it possible that this many solar companies are going to succeed? They're not.”

As UCTE communicated yesterday, a UCTE Investigation Committee was set up this morning and placed under the chairmanship of Gerard A. Maas (as Chairman of the UCTE Steering Committee) who will be assisted by three convenors (corresponding to the 3-fold split in the system). The task of the UCTE investigation Committee is to clarify the causes of the incident and identify possible additional measures to be taken to prevent such disturbances to occur again. Due to the fact that the disturbance had an impact on all UCTE TSOs, all UCTE members will participate in the investigation. The preliminary results of this investigation will be available by the end of November.

The German distributor E.ON admitted it caused the blackouts, by switching off a power cable across the River Ems to allow a cruise ship to pass. This meant areas to the west were left with a power deficit, while cables in the east were overloaded. Supplies cut out in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Croatia and Italy. The EU's Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs has called for the European Transmission System Operators (ETSO) to identify the problem urgently and ensure that such a blackout does not happen again.

A chain of power outages that swept through Belgium, France, Spain and even touched Morocco was blamed Sunday on Germany, but experts were divided about the original trigger for the blackout that affected millions of homes. The government of North Rhine Westphalia state, which was worst hit by the outage, said a load-balancing error after a surge of power from German wind-power turbines had played a role. Too much power entered the German grid and parts of it shut down.