Category Archives: Wind Power

Heatwave forecast for south-eastern Australia triggers energy supply and fire danger warnings

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Coming hot weather prompts Australian Energy Market Operator to predict shortfall in electricity supplies for NSW and Queensland

South-eastern Australia will endure its first big heatwave of the season in the coming days, elevating fire risks and potentially straining the power grid in some states.

Dean Narramore, a senior Bureau of Meteorology forecaster, said day and night temperatures would be as much as 8-14C hotter than usual for this time of year.

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Subsea cables to help Britain meet green energy goal get green light

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Ofgem gives green light to five interconnectors capable of powering millions of homes

Projects to lay five subsea power cables capable of powering millions of homes have been given the green light as Great Britain prepares to use its giant offshore windfarms to become a net exporter of green electricity in the 2030s.

The energy regulator, Ofgem, has approved three subsea cable projects linking Great Britain to power grids in Germany, Ireland and Northern Ireland to help share renewable electricity across borders.

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Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears

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Decision comes after military concludes projects would complicate defending Nato’s newest member against attack

Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks.

The country’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast.

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Great British Energy can become a major power generator, says its chair

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Jürgen Maier’s vision for company includes the potential to borrow its own money in order to rival multinationals

Britain’s new national energy company will eventually become a major power generator, running its own windfarms, tidal power and carbon capture schemes and potentially borrowing its own money, according to its new chair.

Jürgen Maier, the chair of Great British Energy (GBE), told the Guardian in an interview that his vision for the company far outstrips its current scope and would put it on a par with multinational firms such as Denmark’s Ørsted or Sweden’s Vattenfall.

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China to head green energy boom with 60% of new projects in next six years

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IEA says faster clean energy rollout being led by solar power in China with country set to boast half of world’s renewables by 2030

China is expected to account for almost 60% of all renewable energy capacity installed worldwide between now and 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

The IEA’s highly influential renewable energy report found that over the next six years renewable energy projects will roll out at three times the pace of the previous six years, led by the clean energy programmes of China and India.

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Renewable energy auction secures enough power for 11m UK homes

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£1.5bn auction awards record funding for new windfarms, solar farms and tidal power projects

Great Britain’s renewable energy auction has secured enough new clean electricity projects to power 11m UK homes after the Labour government made record funding available to suppliers.

The £1.5bn auction will support 131 new projects including windfarms, solar farms and tidal power projects after ministers increased the amount of funding available to seven times the sums offered last year.

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Australia could save thousands of bats a year with simple tweak to wind turbines, study says

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Raising the wind speed at which turbines start spinning could prevent tens of thousands of bat deaths each year, researchers find

Australian windfarm operators are being urged to embrace a simple measure used overseas that scientists say could dramatically reduce the number of bats killed by turbines.

Curtailment – lifting the wind speed at which turbines start spinning – is used in some European countries and parts of the US and Canada, but rarely in Australia. A global study published in the journal BioScience found it was an effective way to limit bat deaths.

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China adds new clean power equivalent to UK’s entire electricity output

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Data shows continued surge in wind and solar power amid hopes Chinese greenhouse gas emissions may have peaked

China added as much new clean energy generation in the first half of this year as the UK produced from all sources in the same period last year, data shows, as wind and solar power generation continued to surge in the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Electricity generation from coal and gas dropped by 5% in China in July, year on year, according to an update from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) thinktank, basing its analysis on data released by the Chinese government on Thursday.

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Danish wind power giant Ørsted delays major US offshore project

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News follows scrapping of two other Atlantic windfarms and axing of hundreds of jobs as costs surge

The Danish company developing the world’s largest offshore windfarm in the North Sea has been forced to delay a major project off the north-east coast of the US, months after cancelling two nearby developments and cutting hundreds of jobs.

Ørsted has pushed back the start of commercial operations at its 704 megawatt Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut by a year, to 2026.

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Labour tries to attract clean energy contracts with record £1.5bn for auction

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The new budget comes after the previous government failed to award a single new offshore wind contract in 2023

The Labour government will make record amounts of funding available to clean energy developers after it increased the value of its summer subsidy auction by 50%, to £1.5bn.

The addition, compared with figures previously announced, means the total budget is seven times the amount available at last year’s auction, the government said.

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PM calls for Barnaby Joyce to be dumped over ‘bullet’ comment aimed at Labor during anti-wind turbine rally

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Nationals MP apologised after telling anti-renewables protesters to ‘load that magazine’ and that the ‘bullet you have is that little piece of paper’

Prime minister Anthony Albanese says Barnaby Joyce should be sacked from shadow cabinet after the National party MP likened ballot papers to “bullets” during a protest against wind turbines.

Speaking to an anti-renewables rally at Lake Illawarra south of Sydney on Sunday, Joyce compared ballot papers to bullets and urged the crowd to “load that magazine” at the voting booth against the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the energy minister, Chris Bowen.

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Labour told it will need to defeat ‘net-zero nimbys’ to decarbonise Britain

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Opposition in wealthier areas is likely and overcoming it is essential, says Resolution Foundation

The government will need to “take on net-zero nimbys” and ramp up public investment to decarbonise Britain’s homes, transport and electricity system, a leading thinktank has said.

With Keir Starmer promising a rapid transition to decarbonise the power system by 2030, a report by the Resolution Foundation said achieving the target would require more government spending and private investment.

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Cold snap sets record winter demand for electricity in Victoria as NSW windfarms supply third of power

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New peak may be challenged as early as Tuesday evening as mid-winter bites in Melbourne

The wintry blast sweeping across eastern Australia has set a record for electricity demand in Victoria and propelled wind generation in New South Wales to new highs, with energy authorities preparing for another power peak on Tuesday evening.

Victoria broke a 17-year record for maximum winter electricity demand, with the tally reaching 8,612 megawatts at 6pm on Monday, the Australian Energy Market Operator said.

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Labour’s ‘rooftop revolution’ to deliver solar power to millions of UK homes

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Ed Miliband sets new rules on solar panels and approves three giant solar farms as Labour seeks to end years of Tory inaction

Keir Starmer’s new Labour government today unveils plans for a “rooftop revolution” that will see millions more homes fitted with solar panels in order to bring down domestic energy bills and tackle the climate crisis.

The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, also took the hugely controversial decision this weekend to approve three massive solar farms in the east of England that had been blocked by Tory ministers.

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Offshore windfarm zone off Illawarra coast given green light in bid to ‘power Australia’s clean energy future’

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Zone will be 20km off the coast and exclude areas significant for little penguin and for southern right whale migration

The federal government has given the green light to an offshore windfarm zone south of Sydney, making it Australia’s fourth such zone to be declared.

Announcing the project in the Illawarra on Saturday, the climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the move would bring thousands of new jobs and help “power Australia’s clean energy future”.

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‘It’s going to be messy’: advocates balance climate action and conservation amid Queensland’s green energy boom

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‘Some negative projects will get up, but we have to keep our eyes on the broader goals’, says WWF Australia

A map of operating windfarms in Queensland does not take too long to survey – of the 100 or so across Australia, only six of them are in the sunshine state.

But this is about to change in a very big way. According to state government data, there are 46 separate proposals for windfarms in Queensland with four more already under construction.

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Tanya Plibersek rejects claims renewable projects are being held up by approval delays

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The environment minister says she is approving windfarms at the fastest rate in history amid industry concerns about an ‘alarming’ slowdown

Tanya Plibersek has said she is approving windfarms faster than any previous environment minister, rejecting industry claims the sector faces deteriorating investment conditions and lengthening delays.

Renewable energy firms have raised concerns that securing environmental approval is becoming more difficult, particularly for wind. Challenges are unlikely to ease soon, given the government’s recent decision to postpone conservation law reforms until after the next election, putting at risk emissions reduction goals, they say.

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Tanya Plibersek rejects windfarm proposed for biodiverse Queensland forest

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Plan for 42-turbine Wooroora project withdrawn after minister signals refusal because of threat to spectacled flying-fox habitat

A proposed windfarm next to the wet tropics world heritage area in north Queensland will not go ahead after the federal government signalled it would refuse the project.

Ark Energy had proposed building the 42-turbine Wooroora Station windfarm – formerly known as the Chalumbin windfarm project – 15km south-west of Ravenshoe.

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Labour would lift block on onshore windfarms, says Ed Miliband

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Tory government has ‘ducked’ difficult decisions, leading to higher bills, says shadow energy secretary

Labour has claimed a “culture of inertia and stasis” has blocked renewable energy projects under the Conservatives and says the party will overturn a de facto onshore wind ban “at the stroke of a pen” if it wins the general election.

The shadow energy secretary, Ed Miliband, told energy industry executives at a conference in London on Tuesday that Labour would immediately rip up a decade-long effective block on large onshore wind developments in England if elected.

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Solar and on-shore wind provide cheapest electricity and nuclear most expensive, CSIRO analysis shows

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Estimates show small modular nuclear reactors would provide most expensive power and will not be available until 2030

Electricity generated by solar and on-shore wind is the cheapest in Australia, even after the significant expense of integrating them into the power grid is factored in, according to new analysis from the CSIRO.

Estimates of costs to build small modular nuclear reactors – a technology supported by the Coalition but not expected to be commercially available until at least 2030 – have risen dramatically and would provide the most expensive power, according to the draft GenCost report.

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