Oil prices have steadily risen since the start of this year, at one point even going beyond 28 dollars per barrel, and while this is worrisome to most people, one sector of German industry is expectantly rubbing its hands: the renewable energy companies.
“An increased use of renewable energies and a change in consumer behaviour…will first set in when the 30 dollar (per barrel) mark is exceeded,” says Norbert Allnoch, director of the International Economic Forum for Regenerative Energy (IWR). Only when the expectation sets in that “over the long term will there be higher oil prices” can a change in consumers’ habits be expected, adds Allnoch of the Muenster-based think tank. Regenerative energy is a grab-bag term to cover a wide range of alternatives to fossil or nuclear fuels, including solar cells, hydroelectricity, wind power and bio-gas. But reports from the sector in Germany show that, increasingly, thought is being given to combinations of these technologies, as well as to further fine-tuning of them. While still not completely competitive in economic terms with conventional power, they will look increasingly attractive the higher the price of oil goes. And even now, thanks to improved wind power engineering technology, wind generators are starting to become cost-competitive under the right conditions, notes Dietmar Kestner, chairman of the Nordex AG company in Norderstedt, just north of Hamburg. A windpower park which Nordex has built at Zafarana, 200 kilometres southwest of Cairo and where wind conditions are favourable, electricity costs have been reduced to just three cents (2.4 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour. “In other words, wind energy can be…fully competitive,” Kestner wrote for the daily Die Welt in arguing the case that for German windpower companies to continue their strong expansion, they must do more on export markets. Favourable wind conditions like in the Egyptian desert are the promise held out by offshore windparks, experts in the industry agree, and the projections are now being made that sea-based wind generation will be the growth area of the future in Germany, with its long North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines. The Hamburg Trade Fair company, which will be staging the first ever wind power exhibition in the northern German city in June, recently published a study predicting the strong expansion for offshore wind generators. At the moment, after a further 2,650 megawatts of installed capacity were added in 2001, Germany has 8,750 megawatts installed capacity of land-based wind generation – accounting for about 3.5 per cent of the country’s nominal electricity needs – but zero megawatts offshore. By the year 2010, the figures are projected at 20,000 MW onshore and 2,400 MW offshore, according to the Hamburg Trade Fair study. By 2030, the respective figures will be 21,000 MW onshore and 26,000 MW offshore. One obvious conclusion from these projections is that after 2010, land-based wind power parks will virtually stagnate, leaving the sea as the only place for strong expansion in German windpower. Ironically, while the expansion of land-based windpower in Germany is foreseen continuing up till 2010, this will not necessarily mean that the landscape must become more cluttered with windparks. Instead, under technological improvements broadly termed “re- powering”, there could be fewer, but largely more powerful, wind generators at work, predicts the Wind Energy Federation BWE. Jochen Twele of the Berlin-based federation notes how over the past decade, wind generators have seen a ten-fold growth in performance, from 250 kilowatts in the early 1990s to up to 2,500 kilowatts (2.5 MW) at present. “(This expansion) is virtually unprecedented in machinery engineering and can be compared more with the pace of development in the area of computers and information technologies,” he said. With wind generators becoming more powerful the prospect now is for the “replacement of older wind energy facilities by new enhanced performance machinery” the BWE said. “For example, a windpark with 10 generators producing a nominal 2,500 kilowatts could be replaced by only three combining to produce 4,500 kilowatts”. However, a possible drawback to this is size. The future more powerful wind generators of three to five MW now in development will be greatly larger – with rotor blades of 100 to 120 metres – according to Twele. He says such dimensions would speak more for their use in offshore parks. Further enhancement of existing windparks is also promised by a Darmstadt company called WindSolar, which has entered the market with a “hybrid” concept.The idea is to install solar panels at windparks, increasing the power output from a site where the line feed into the electricity grid is already in place, thereby saving on precious space.
