GWEC 2006 report predicts 19% annual growth in global installed capacity up to 2010!

I met with the well intentioned GWEC at the recent EWEC2007 conference, and was delighted to see that their latest annual report was completed for 2006. It provides a great source of apolitical information on the wind industry; of course they are a wind industry funded Belgian based lobby group!

Despite the strong growth we have witnessed in the past, we estimate that the biggest developments are still ahead,” said Angelika Pullen, GWEC’s Policy & Communications Director, when presenting the report at the European Wind Energy Conference in Milan this week. “Until the end of the current decade, the cumulative capacity of wind energy installations is predicted to reach 149.5 GW, more than double the installed capacity at the end of 2006.”

Global installed capacity reached 74,223 MW by the end of 2006, which exceeded most industry projections. The GWEC projections use a simple linear extrapolation, however barring any major market problems is quite reasonable (I've plotted GWEC projections against historic data above as a sanity check). See the full report here Great stuff!

Strong growth in the installed capacities of the US, Europe, India, and China - however very disappointing results in Australia - most probably due to all of those poor dead parrots? On a positive side there is a great transcript from the ABC's 7.30 report that balances the Australian side a little here.