April 15, 2008
Germany

German utilities, wind power industry dismiss govt's 2020 wind power target

German utilities and wind turbine makers have dismissed the government’s goal of boosting off-shore wind power capacity to 15,000 megawatts by 2020, citing a lack of resources and transmission lines, Financial Times Deutschland said.

The goal, which is equivalent to 3,000 high-capacity wind turbines, is ‘not viable, neither from an economic nor a technological point of view,’ the paper quoted a spokesman from German utility E.ON AG as saying.

The construction of off-shore wind parks is slowed down by a lack of turbines, transport vessels and specialised engineers, the BWE association of Germany’s wind power industry said.

The legal reimbursement of 14 euro cents per kilowatt hour of off-shore wind power is sufficient but building transmission lines from the wind parks to consumers on the continent is not profitable enough to encourage investments, BWE managing director Ralf Bischof said.

The build-up of wind power capacity will be held back by bottlenecks in the power grid and barriers to upgrading transmission lines need to be removed, the paper cited E.ON chief executive officer Wulf Bernotat as saying.

Thomson Financial

AFX