Global installed capacity beats expectations in 2007!

GWEC have just announced that the global installed capacity of wind energy jumped in 2007 with 20 GW of installed capacity - I've plotted that against other historic data and projections in the chart there. This beats last years expectations (see my previous post), and shows that the wind industry is really going strong. The lead country market was the US with 5.2 GW of capacity, followed by Spain and then China, however Europe continued to lead with 61% of the installed capacity for 2007. More encouraging to me, 150MW was installed in New Zealand - harvesting some of their great natural wind resources with very little government economic incentives.

So how much is 20 GW of wind energy? If we assume an average capacity factor of 25% (which is relatively conservative) - that's about in practical terms:

• 15,000 individual turbines costing around €30 billion to install
• 55 TW.hr of additional annual energy production - enough for about 13 million average EU households
• Additional annual energy sales revenue of roughly €300 million (at EU prices)

No doubt about it, wind energy today is big business, and the market is naturally allocating capital to it's development with relatively minimal government assistance now.

One major assumption here is that the installed capacity of turbines represents only that a turbine at a rated-power is errected at a site - and doesn't consider the commissioning, grid connection, and the actual energy production. Additionally, there is no allowance for the phasing out of older turbines (not that significant now, however will get more and more so). Anecdotal reports are that 25% of new capacity in China is still not connected to the grid due to planning problems (I will try and find a reference for that!).