The North Sea countries will meet in Denmark on Thursday to make agreements on boosting offshore wind energy, a sector suffering from fierce competition from China.
At the meeting, eight countries – Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway and Ireland – and the European Commission are expected to reach an agreement on the installation of around 20,000 wind turbines in the North Sea by 2050.
According to analyst firm Wood Mackenzie, China currently accounts for 82 percent of new wind energy orders.
“The EU cannot lose momentum, we must make sure we choose the right path,” Danish Energy Minister Lars Aagaard told AFP.
In Denmark, which commissioned its first wind energy farm in 1991, more than 40 percent of electricity comes from wind energy.
At the port of Odense, where the talks are taking place, port director Carsten Aa told AFP that turbines are being produced for farms across Europe, the US market and the Philippines.
In 2011, the first nacelle – the housing that houses the components needed to operate the wind turbine, including the generator and transmission – was produced by turbine manufacturer Vestas at the Lindo shipyard, used by global shipping giant Maersk to power its ships build until 2009.
Since then, around 1,500 offshore wind turbines have been assembled at the site.
“We are currently leading in the world, but the Chinese are knocking on our door,” Aa said.
– ‘Political ambitions’ –
Most of the port surface is intended for wind energy and Vestas produces, among other things, nacelles, masts and foundations.
The parts are too bulky to be built off-site and transported overland before being loaded onto ships and installed at sea.
“If we want to realize all political ambitions, we need even more production in European seaports,” Aa emphasized.
He hopes Odense will take the lead in countering Chinese competition.
“We have gone from an outdated industrial area to a state-of-the-art facility and production facility by using old shipyard workers… to produce wind turbines,” the port director explained.
In France, the Port of Nantes Saint-Nazaire recently presented a project to develop a platform for the deployment of future offshore wind farms.
The port of Odense is also expanding. When it closed in 2009, the shipyard employed 2,700 people, and now employs more than 3,200 people at the site, which has grown by 18 percent in the past two years.
“What makes us unique is that the area is very large… we have the area around the old shipyard to be able to develop new products and new production halls,” says Soren Rask, the head of port security who started his career as a blacksmith on the shipyard, told AFP.
cbw/jll/ju/giv
