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Within 4 days – from 1 - 4 December 2020 – all eyes of the global wind energy industry had been turning to the international wind energy summit WindEnergy Hamburg, which this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was held online with a broadcast on WindTV.
WindTV is an innovative event concept, produced jointly by WindEurope, GWEC and Hamburg Messe und Congress. From 4 studios in Brussels, Hamburg, Essen and Port Shoreham (UK), two WindTV channels - OpenStream and Premium - offered documentaries, news, interviews, TED talk format, Global Wind Briefs and entertaining content - all designed to bring the audience the role of wind energy in the sustainable development of Europe and the world. “Live WindTV stream is much more than just a traditional WindEurope conference. It is also a new format for communication with experts and interaction with participants, including a whole load of features - videos, interviews, entertainment. There were top speakers from industry, government, finance and technology - and from other walks of life including music and sport. All in a range of different formats. It's absolutely not your usual Zoom webinars!” explains Giles Dickson, WindEurope CEO.
The list of speakers included European Commissioner for Energy, Kadri Simson, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, the Energy Ministers of Germany, UK, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, Ireland, Estonia and Luxembourg, leaders of financial institutions, start-ups and innovation as well as CEOs from leading industry players, such as Tennet, BASF, RWE Renewables, MHI Vestas, Vattenfall and Nordex and etc. Speakers covered a wide range of topics, from the development of global wind markets and challenges related to permitting procedures and community engagement, to hydrogen from wind power, digitalisation, electrification and system integration.
During the opening Ministerial session, great attention was paid to the issue of integration, the interconnection of wind energy (power) sectors of European countries.
UK energy minister Kwasi Kwarteng and his Belgian counterpart Tinne Van der Straeten talked about facilitating a dialogue on integration of offshore wind farms into a single North Sea power system. Denmark’s energy and climate minster Dan Jorgensen was also keen to talk about interconnection, describing his country’s plans for up to 12GW of sea-based “energy hubs” that can connect to multiple nations.
Another red thread running through WindEnergy Hamburg and WindTV was hydrogen. Poland’s energy minister Michal Kurtyka revealed his nation’s plan to establish a ‘hydrogen highway’ to transport green power and H2 from Baltic offshore wind farms south. Hydrogen was on the mind of German energy minister Peter Altmaier when he announced support for a wind-based green H2 project in Chile involving Porsche, Siemens Energy, Enel and others – the first such backing under Germany’s new national hydrogen strategy.
One of the most eye-catching onshore wind announcements of the week came from Siemens Gamesa, which said its pioneering project to link a turbine directly to green hydrogen production would be up and running in Denmark as soon as next month – with the H2 used to fuel taxis in Copenhagen and elsewhere.
Each day had a specific theme: with Day 1 focused on challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the conditions necessary to accelerate the deployment of wind energy technologies; Day 2 marked a digital revolution in the onshore wind energy sector; the focal topic of Day 3 was offshore wind and Day 4 was devoted to Europe’s wind energy supply chain.
IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol presented the current status of the development of renewable energy sources worldwide and in Europe, identified the impact of COVID-19 pandemic for the renewables and predicted the further global deployment of green energy. Dr. Birol was convinced that “the shock that the global energy sector has been facing from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented since the Second World War and the scar from this shock will be substantial for many decades to come". He summed up that the pandemic reduced energy demand by 5% in 2020. Compared to the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis, energy consumption fell by a factor of seven. At the same time, according to Dr. Birol, “renewables are immune to the COVID-19 pandemic. They are quite resilience. The total share of sun and wind in the European energy mix may reach 80% in 10 years, but for this national governments should be an active part of RES development, don’t expect the market to do everything alone”.
Dr. Birol also expects the cost of offshore wind to fall in a “similar, if not steeper” way to solar power over the past ten years, but is concerned that the offshore wind supply chain might go the same way as PV, with European pioneers losing out to Asian competitors: “The way we saw in the last ten years the cost reduction in solar, I think we will see similar, if not steeper cost reductions in offshore wind across the world, and hopefully starting with Europe”. “Now while I am hopeful that Europe will continue to be a leader on offshore wind, I am thinking, ‘are we going to see the same movie that we have seen with solar?’. What do I mean with that? When we think of solar, ten years ago it was Germany, Spain, Italy [that] put a lot of subsidies (into the sector), they were the frontrunners in terms of solar energy. But when we look at today, 80% of the solar PV is manufactured somewhere in Asia. And Europe is now behind”, Fatih Birol said.
According to the IEA’s Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2019 report, released in June 2020, the cost of solar energy fell by 82% in 2010-2019. Over the same period, the cost of offshore wind dropped by 29%.
EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson underlined her backing for onshore and offshore wind as a vital plank of the bloc’s net-zero agenda, and pledged policy measures to help the sector achieve its potential of 750GW on land and 300GW at sea by 2050. An alternative forecast for offshore wind power development was proposed by the Ocean Renewable Energy Action Coalition (OREAC), which predicted the possibility of achieving 1400 GW of total offshore wind power capacity worldwide by 2050.
The UK’s offshore wind plan claimed its 40GW ambition by 2030 while newcomers on the sector’s stage Estonia and Latvia informed about their 1GW cross-border project in the Baltic.
Top wind CEOs of manufacturers were worried about the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and further changes in the supply chains, but today they unanimously declare the ability of the wind power sector to operate and “turn the blades” in times of any crisis. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy CEO Andreas Nauen, said: “I shared the view of the fear at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, but I think the whole industry proved that we were pretty resilient.”
Vestas chief Henrik Andersen stressed the importance of clear short-term planning: “Throughout 2020 the industry has had opportunity to evidence that we could be relied on in difficult times. But this pandemic has shown the unpredictability of life: right now people like to talk about the big stuff and the big dreams in 2050 rather than what is going to happen in the first five years. We have a whole young generation that looks at us and is saying, ‘Well if you can’t even fix the start of it, how do we dare to think and believe in 2050?”
Two entertainment programs became a feature of WindTV: the interactive “WindEnergy Quiz Night”, within which the participants had the opportunity to pass the real-time test on basics and the history of wind energy and the intellectual battles between children and the wind gurus from the leading wind energy companies, who presented their visions of the development of onshore and offshore wind power worldwide.
Unfortunately, due to technical problems, this year there was no world-famous wind power exhibition WindEnergy Hamburg. However, this did not prevent wind industry leaders to demonstrate their achievements:
“The more industrialised we can be (as an industry) the bigger the role we can play. For Vestas as the biggest player onshore and offshore, we can hopefully do a lot. I do see, for instance, opportunity for getting a lower levelised cost of energy for offshore wind – and somewhat too on onshore,” says recently installed CTO Anders Nielsen.
All four days program recordings are already available on the official website of Windenergy Hamburg 2020: https://www.windenergyhamburg.com/en/event/windtv/programme/
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