World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

January 25, 2004 – Vol.8 No.44

WORLD WIND WATCH.

Foot-dragging in the U.S. Congress may put 1.6 gigawatts of new wind capacity at risk in 2004 alone, according to a new report from Platts Research and Consulting. And even if the production tax credit (PTC) for wind energy is renewed for three years, as proposed in the massive energy bill stalled in the U.S. Senate, the future of tax-subsidized, grid-scale wind power may be in jeopardy.

According to Platts, institutional equity investors needed for new wind capacity are particularly sensitive to tax policy uncertainty. That is, investors like long-term stability in tax policy, not policy that must be renewed every few years and is subject to the political whims of Congress - like the PTC for wind energy.

The PTC of 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour expired at the end of 2003. The extension of the PTC was included in the $31 billion energy bill that lost in the Senate by a few votes near the end of 2003. The measure is supposedly on the floor again in March.

The study - Financing Wind - will be available to members of Platts R&C Renewable Power Service in February at http://www.platts.com/ .

Europe currently has a 90-percent share in the world wind turbine market, a market that the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) expects to be valued at an annual EUR 75 billion (USD $93 billion) by 2020.

With that prize in mind, EWEA would like to see its member companies keep up the pace of leadership in the industry. In its effort to do so the organization has launched its first industry-wide coordinated Research and Development Strategy with nine R&D priority areas that it feels the industry players should concentrate on in the coming years. The priority areas range from engineering and technical topics, such as turbine component design, to business, social and environmental issues

More detail on the EWEA strategy can be found at http://www.ewea.org/