Offshore wind hits record capacity on China, Vietnam growth: study

[Viet]

Lobby group says Glasgow targets gave renewables a boost but more action is needed​

Wind turbines in Bac Lieu Province, Vietnam. The planet added 21.1 gigawatts of offshore wind power last year, the highest ever and triple the 2020 figure, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. © Reuters
LIEN HOANG, Nikkei staff writerApril 5, 2022 16:56 JST


HO CHI MINH CITY -- Vietnam and Australia joined the ranks of countries with the most new wind farms while power players China and India bulked up their already-massive capacity in a record year for wind-based electricity, new research shows.

The planet added 21.1 gigawatts of offshore wind power last year, the highest ever and triple the 2020 figure, while adding 72.5 GW onshore -- but these numbers must quadruple in the next decade to fight climate change, said the Global Wind Energy Council. The industry lobby's annual report said Asia accounted for 59% of new installations in 2021, a year when the COP26 summit anchored a bevy of pledges to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Meanwhile, the report said, the "brutal" war in Ukraine drove home the fear that countries can be "held hostage to energy supply." It also saw costs shoot up for steel, copper and other inputs for wind towers.

"We reached new shores and seabeds," Joyce Lee, policy and projects head at the council, said of 2021 growth. But she warned that "perverse market design," such as oil subsidies, further threatens a globe already in an energy crisis.

"Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 provided another clear message to governments: Dependency on imported fossil fuels is not only dangerous for environmental and human health, but a grave threat to geopolitical and energy security," she wrote in the report, released late Monday.

China and the U.S., where companies are rushing to plant wind turbines before state subsidies expire, remained the biggest onshore markets for new and total turbines, the report showed. But smaller players climbed the ladder in 2021, with Vietnam at No. 3 for offshore and No. 4 for onshore installations, after having failed to crack the top 10 the year before. The investment was propelled by a deadline to lock in prices.

Others in the region with the biggest bump in onshore capacity were Australia, India and Turkey, the lobby group said.

Plenty of headwinds could throw off course the global switch to clean energy. Turbine businesses complain the prices they charge are set years in advance, but now the pandemic recovery and the war have pushed their expenses for materials and shipping skyward.

"We are witnessing a colossal policy and market failure in terms of providing the necessary investment signals for the energy transition," the council's CEO, Ben Backwell, wrote in the report's foreword. "Fossil fuel companies, including coal producers, are seeing record profits -- ultimately paid for by consumers -- while renewable energy companies struggle to break even or invest in new capacity. All of this makes a mockery of the collective international action promised at COP26."

The council argued that alternative energy should be given priority in such areas as land, grid connections and state contracts, as it needs a pricing system that reflects "the socioeconomic and environmental costs of carbon."
Pollution has long been the classic "negative externality," a cost of growth that industries do not suffer directly but pass on to society. A 2020 study for the European Commission put a euro price tag on this externality, calculating the health and environmental damage of fossil fuels at several orders of magnitude greater than that of renewables.

The wind lobby said the world generates 837 GW of electricity from wind, led by the Asia-Pacific region, helping the world avoid over 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually -- equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of South America. And that figure is set to grow 6.6% a year for the next five years. China dominates, taking just a few years to achieve the offshore capacity that, in Europe, had required three decades, GWEC said.

Offshore wind hits record capacity on China, Vietnam growth: study

Lobby group says Glasgow targets gave renewables a boost but more action is needed

asia.nikkei.com