Will the North Sea become the world’s main wind energy hub?
The doubts of analysts and economic operators in Germany on the real feasibility of the agreement between the leaders of nine European countries that have signed an agreement to exploit the potential of offshore wind farms in the North Sea. Pierluigi Mennitti's insight from Berlin
On the one hand the announcements, always very ambitious, on the other the reality, which often contradicts the international catwalks. And so while in Ostend, Belgium, the leaders of nine European countries bordering the North Sea sign an agreement to exploit the potential of offshore wind farms in the marine region, creating what Belgian premier Alexander De Croohas envisaged as "the most Europe's largest power plant”, the German press is ticking the box about what is really moving on concrete ground.
The new project launched in Ostend aims to generate with a production that will gradually increase over 300 gigawatts (GW) of electricity per year by 2050. The projected cost of more than 800 billion euros is financed by the European Union.
Germany is one of nine countries involved. Seven of them are members of the European Union (in addition to Germany, France, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland and precisely Belgium, the host country of the conference), the other two are not: Great Britain, fresh from Brexit, and the Norway, one of the big global players in terms of energy and today the most important for Europe after the eclipse of the Russian horizon. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, present in Ostend on behalf of his country, was as always full of promises.
"We have to go faster", he said, referring to the many road maps announced in recent months for marine wind farm projects, including in this North Sea, "we cannot waste any more time identifying areas, authorizing, building of plants and networks". Scholz then recalled that many laws in the EU and in Germany have been changed to favor the expansion of renewable energies and underlined the importance of the presence of industrialists at the Ostend conference-summit, "because decisions must now also be made at corporate headquarters. The expansion of the network must proceed with the same rapidity as the expansion of production, the chancellor added, and "this is because industrial centers are often not located on the coast".
Indications of common sense, except that it was not an analyst in the energy sector who pronounced them, but the man (almost) alone in command of the gigantic administrative machine of the most powerful economy in the region.
So far, on the wind power front, the big, sometimes bombastic promises have been followed by modest deeds. "The expansion of offshore wind energy in Germany has been slow in recent times", comments the online newspaper of the Tagesschau, the news of the first German public channel Ard, and if last year the value of offshore wind energy in nine states present in Ostend was around 30 gigawatts, Germany has so far around eight gigawatts of offshore capacity.
The Federal Republic ranks second in Europe, after Great Britain with 14 gigawatts, while France, Norway and Ireland each produce less than one gigawatt. It would seem a satisfactory result, were it not for the fact that Germany, unique among all the states involved, had announced its epoch-making plan for an energy change twelve years ago with great fanfare, the Energiewende envisaged by Angela Merkel as a counterpart to the exit from nuclear energy . It was 2011, after the Fukushima accident. Today nuclear power is a closed story and that of wind turbines an adventure that has just begun.
It must be said that the current government cannot take charge of the delays accumulated by an energy turnaround administered for a long time by the Merkel governments, whose inconsistency on the concrete level of infrastructure modernization (whether they are commercial transport or energy changes little) appears only today a discovery for all. And it is also true that under the impetus of Green Minister Robert Habeck, regulations have been changed (also to the disappointment of many environmentalists) to speed up procedures for new wind farms, both on land and at sea.
But when it comes to reckoning, the results still don't match the ambitions. “Designing a wind farm already takes three to four years on land, offshore plants need much longer,” explained Paul Kühn, energy expert at the Fraunhofer Institut . The latest law passed by the government, with reference to wind power on land, directly engages the responsibility of the Länder and imposes the allocation of 2 percent of the territory to wind turbines. Currently, only about 0.8% of the federal territory is devoted to onshore wind energy, and 0.5% is actually used.
These numbers make analysts and entrepreneurs in the wind sector skeptical of the new projects announced in Ostend. Which, moreover, follow similar proposals elaborated by a quartet of countries last year in Ebsbjerg, Denmark. Four countries also present in Ostend: Germany, Denmark, Holland and Belgium. There too, in the city where the Danish wind power giant Vestas is based, a plan was launched to quadruple the capacity of current offshore wind power in eight years, aiming overall to produce 65 gigawatts. A first step to then launch towards multiplication by ten by the middle of the century: 150 gigavatt in 2050.
The projects in Ostend are also ambitious. “This is a colossal undertaking and a true example of the energy transition in action,” the leaders of the nine countries indicated in a joint document published by Politico magazine. This would require massive investments both on land and at sea. “We cannot wait years for approval processes while global temperatures rise and autocratic governments have the power to turn off the lights in our living rooms and block our industrial production,” the document continues.
Will it be the right time? To be credible, politicians' projects must stand on the legs of industry. Wolfram Axthelm, director general of the German Wind Energy Association, says that in the coming years, the wind industry will be looking for workers on a large scale for the expansion of renewable energy. And that this could be a problem. “The planned doubling of installed wind capacity by 2030 will not be possible without an increase in personnel,” he explains in an interview with the dpa news agency, “this does not mean that we will need 100 percent more personnel, but that there will necessarily be a very significant increase, on the order of several tens of thousands of people”.
Recently, a study by the Competence Center for Skilled Worker Safety (Kofa) of the German Economic Institute reported that the expansion of solar and wind energy alone is missing 216,000 skilled workers in around 190 occupations. Axthelm, with specific reference to wind power, clarifies that the picture is rather complex due to a series of concomitant factors. Firstly, all companies are facing shortages of skilled and competent workforces in almost all sectors of German industry. With a consequent, unbridled internal competition between companies in general and in the energy sector in particular: "Almost all operators in the sector are hiring new personnel at the moment and above all we realize that we are in competition with others, that we must do a greater effort to find the right people”.
And for the wind industry, a further aggravating factor intervenes: companies "are still grappling with the consequences of the enormous reductions in personnel in recent years, a consequence of the faltering expansion of wind energy". Now this delay must be filled in the context of two weaknesses: that of the shortage of the general workforce and the necessary increase in personnel that the new growth strategies of wind energy require.
Here the past of announcements without concrete consequent policies returns to loom over the present and the projects heralded in the top management. But this time the management appears obliged, the breaking of the old balances and ties does not allow for shortcuts: there is no longer Russian gas to remedy the miseries of an energy turnaround for a decade blocked on the edge of propaganda.
“The real reason for the North Sea Fever is that it is gradually becoming clear how much energy Europe will need one day, in a climate-friendly way, to be able to maintain its prosperity and its industry,” the project commented. launched the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Ostend. So, even in this case, there is the risk of reckoning without the innkeeper. Because, the German daily observes again, "the green power plant of the North Sea is not at all sufficient, therefore upward corrections of the 800 billion euros that the wind energy industry and the EU Commission have calculated only for the investments in the North Sea and inland”.
And he concludes: “These are figures that the supporters of renewable energies in this country do not indicate with the same fervor as the costs and subsidies for other energy sources. The scoop of ice cream that must have cost them their amusement is soon as big as the earth."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/il-mare-del-nord-diventera-il-principale-hub-di-energia-eolica-al-mondo/ on Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:35:47 +0000.