‘We need more wind power’
Invested in renewables
What is the future of wind power? Wind energy has the potential to provide a big part of the power we need. Here’s how the sector is building, and some of the innovations you’ll see in coming years
[What is the future of wind power? ]
[One of the cheapest, most reliable energy sources, wind could power a big part of our energy needs. Here are innovations that will make it even more effective.]
‘We need more wind power’
Invested in renewables
What is the future of wind power? Wind energy has the potential to provide a big part of the power we need. Here’s how the sector is building, and some of the innovations you’ll see in coming years
[What is the future of wind power? ]
[One of the cheapest, most reliable energy sources, wind could power a big part of our energy needs. Here are innovations that will make it even more effective.]
After retiring 10 years ago as chief technology officer at a big wind power company, Henrik Stiesdal could not sit still. He kept tinkering to find more innovations in floating wind energy and green fuels.
“My motivation was always to create good things with good people and have fun in the process,” says Stiesdal, a Danish inventor who holds more than a thousand patents and designed the three-blade turbine concept in 1978 that formed the basis of the global wind energy sector. “To achieve even more with wind energy, the next step needs to be a further drop in costs by way of even more streamlined mass production.”
Wind energy has come a long way in a short amount of time. In many countries, it is one of the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy. In 1991, the world’s first offshore wind farm was built at Vindeby in Denmark with a 5 MW capacity, using Stiesdal’s turbine design. Today, Europe has 255 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity, enough to power nearly 100 million homes. Wind generated more electricity than gas for the first time ever in Europe in 2023.
There is a lot of good news and innovation in wind, including airborne turbines that capture energy among the clouds and gigantic 15-megawatt turbines whose rotor diameter is as long as two football fields.
The industry is facing some turbulence, however. Soaring materials cost, high interest rates and supply chain disruptions are forcing some wind power developers to delay or halt new projects. Wind farm developers say they need easier access to finance and better loan terms.
“Everything starts with the ability to build a robust pipeline of projects,” says Christos Smyrnakis, a wind energy expert at the European Investment Bank. “We can be optimistic and ambitious because there’s a great story to tell in wind energy, but we need to keep overcoming the hurdles, too.”
When it comes to deploying wind power, the good news is that “we know how to do it,” Stiesdal says, “There is a recipe that really delivered, and that recipe is how we got Danish wind power to dominate the world.”
Stiesdal, who now runs a green energy development company, credits several steps for making Denmark a leader in the wind energy sector. They include government decisions to set a fixed price for electricity generated from wind power and subsidies to encourage investment.
“The government created a market, and once there is a market, then the supply and the competition followed by themselves,” Stiesdal says.
Stiesdal sold the license for the commercial design of wind turbines in 1979 to Vestas, which at that time was doing business in farm vehicles, cranes and milk coolers. This sale helped kick-start today’s wind industry and made Denmark a powerhouse in wind production. Today, 60% of Denmark’s electricity comes from wind.
Denmark’s wind energy sector also has done well because the country has had flexible laws and clear targets for increasing wind energy, together with better land planning, permitting and grid planning policies.
Stiesdal estimates that about 1 100 gigawatts of wind energy is now produced globally, and that one quarter of that energy comes from turbines made in Denmark or from Danish suppliers operating in other parts of the world.
What can we learn from the way this small European country unlocked wind energy across the world?
A vital lesson is the need to generate market demand. This means creating conditions that encourage investment and competition among suppliers. Institutions like the European Investment Bank boost confidence in the market and provide funds for wind companies to innovate.
In 2023, the Bank provided more than €21 billion for clean energy projects, including nearly €3.4 billion for wind energy on land and sea. The European Investment Bank is “making things happen that wouldn’t otherwise have happened,” Stiesdal says.
In 2023, the Bank announced a €5 billion finance package to support wind energy manufacturers, which is expected to add 32 gigawatts of wind power capacity. The financing is part of a new support initiative in 2023 from the European Commission for wind power, including proposals for new regulations on renewable energy permits.
These new EU rules have already enabled the approval of more permits for onshore wind farms in 2023 than in any year previously. However, it still takes longer to obtain a permit for a wind farm than to build it.
To speed things up, wind energy developers and installers are asking authorities to simplify the process and cut unnecessary bureaucracy.
“Project developers need to be able to get permitting smoothly,” Stiesdal says, adding that this would help create a market demand.
While wind turbines started out fairly simple, they have evolved into some of the largest and most complex rotating machines in the world.
The biggest wind energy turbines, such as the 15 megawatts turbines now being developed, are reserved for offshore farms. Offshore sites have two key strengths: strong winds and remote locations that are hidden from sight. “Large offshore projects help reach our global sustainability targets quicker,” says the European Investment Bank’s Smyrnakis. “That's why we have focused and will focus on offshore wind in the coming years.”
Most offshore wind turbines are anchored to the seabed near the coast. According to the International Energy Agency, ‘bottom-fixed’ offshore wind has the potential to meet the world’s total energy needs.
Offshore wind farms now pepper the North and Baltic Seas and new installations are planned.
“We are in the final stages of preparing a large-scale project that will significantly change Poland’s energy mix,” says Daniel Obajtek, chief executive officer of ORLEN, one of the companies that will implement the first offshore wind farm in Poland, one of the largest in the world.
Jointly developed by a consortium led by Baltic Power, the project will produce 1 140 megawatts of power, when it is completed in 2026. That’s enough power for 6 million homes. Baltic Power, which is co-owned by ORLEN and Northland Power, is backed by a €610 million loan from the European Investment Bank.
New wind power installations are also planned in the previously uncharted waters of the Mediterranean.
“Spain, Portugal, France and Greece are planning large scale floating offshore wind farms and Italy will come next probably,” Smyrnakis says. “Italy is already working on fixed-bottom offshore wind farm, so these are the new markets that we expect to see in Europe.”
Wind farms are harder to set up in the Mediterranean because waters close to shore are deeper than in the shallow North or Baltic seas. Those deep waters make it difficult to anchor wind turbines to the seabed, which is partly why floating wind farms are being developed.
“If you can add offshore wind to the Mediterranean, it’s a game changer,” says Alessandro Boschi, head of renewable energy at the European Investment Bank.
Boschi explains that developing wind power in the Mediterranean could bring cheaper energy to the many European countries that border the sea, such as his home country of Italy, where there’s little space for onshore wind farms. “Italy has many landscape constraints with several mountainous and inhabited areas,” says Boschi, “this limits the amount of onshore renewables you can actually build.”
Setting up wind farms in the middle of the sea would avoid those constraints. “And if you produce it far enough away from the coast, it’s visually acceptable for inhabitants.”
It is difficult to find investors willing to support the first movers in any field. The European Investment Bank lent €60 million to Europe’s first commercial floating wind farm in 2018. Located 20 kilometres of the shore of Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal, the wind farm has three turbines with 80-metre blades that tower 210 metres above the water’s surface. That’s higher than a 60-story skyscraper. They are the largest wind turbines ever installed on floating platforms.
“I think this project is really innovative, and I can see it paving the way to help develop the floating industry,” says Figaredo Inocencio, a loan officer at the European Investment Bank who works on wind projects.
WindFloat Atlantic, a joint venture of Ocean Winds, Repsol and Principle Power, runs the project, which provides clean electricity to more than 25 000 households per year.
“Floating wind farms have numerous advantages,” says José Pinheiro, the project director for WindFloat Atlantic. Air currents out at sea are not blocked by any obstacles, such mountains or valleys, so wind blows steadily with no dips or peaks that can stress the equipment.
Pinheiro says offshore parks are the future of wind power. “There’s a great urgency today to find new ways to capture wind energy because of the climate transition,” he says. “With the expertise we’ve developed, we expect to take more big steps in the floating arena.”
The floating wind farms have stood the test of time and held up against bad storms. “In 2023, the wind farm faced some of the biggest storms in its history, with more than 20-metre waves and extremely strong winds,” says Pinheiro, also country manager for Southern Europe at Ocean Winds, the offshore wind company created by EDP Renewables and ENGIE and the developer, operator and majority owner of WindFloat Atlantic.
“Extreme winds challenge turbine designers,” he says. “Engineers had to create systems that would start generating energy at relatively low wind speeds, but that also can survive extremely strong winds.”
“So far, we have not faced any issue when it comes to availability of the wind turbines or having to stop them,” says Pinheiro. The project’s success opens the possibility of taking floating wind energy to a lot of countries with coastlines that make it difficult to bolt wind turbines to the seabed.
WindFloat Atlantic is testing technology that could help wind energy expansion even more. That includes remote drones that fly to the turbines and perform maintenance and testing, and artificial intelligence with cameras that could detect security issues at the project.
Wind energy experts say offshore wind power also requires improved ports and infrastructure to carry electricity from farms to its final destination.
Existing ports need to be refurbished so that the docks are strong enough to support hefty wind turbines and the water is deep enough to allow boats to navigate safely as they transport the turbines.
And European countries are investing in power grids and battery storage technology that can help store energy produced at the wind farms. Grid investment has often fallen behind the growth of renewable energy. A backlog of projects waiting to connect to the grid has caused delays and financial losses for renewable energy companies.
“By 2050, we need cables, we need grids to feed the power into, we need transformers, we need things that are not very wind-specific, but just need to be there,” Stiesdal says.
A good example of a recent port project is located near Montpellier in southern France. Port-la-Nouvelle traditionally handled cereal and other agricultural exports destined for North Africa. Now, the region is investing €340 million, €150 million of which is being provided by the European Investment Bank, to refurbish ports in Sète and Port-la-Nouvelle.
The plans call for Port-la-Nouvelle to be transformed into a Mediterranean hub for the construction, logistics and support of offshore floating wind farms. The hub will also eventually produce green hydrogen from the clean energy generated by the wind farms.
Port-la-Nouvelle is less than 20 kilometres from the offshore wind parks run by Les Éoliennes Flottantes du Golfe du Lion (also an Ocean Winds project) and and EolMed, both of which are supported by the European Investment Bank. Location matters when it comes to infrastructure for offshore wind farms, particularly the floating kind. The relatively short distance between the port and the wind farms reduces the risks involved in transporting the huge structures at sea.
Wind energy has been used for millennia (though to grind wheat, rather than produce electricity). But onshore and offshore wind energy technologies have evolved over the last few years to maximise the electricity produced. Some of the main recent innovations include:
If the size of wind turbines continues to grow at the same pace as the last 15 years, they could reach 30 megawatts by 2035, compared with a maximum of 15 megawatts today. Scaling up wind turbines is technically difficult, however. It’s not as simple as building a bigger tower and longer blades. The engineering has to work in difficult environments offshore or afloat.
Engineers are also in the early stages of creating airborne wind turbines, which either use a gas like helium or their own aerodynamics to float high in the air where the wind is stronger. Airborne turbines convert wind energy into electricity through autonomous kites, drones or unmanned aircrafts linked to the ground.
These systems are designed for offshore use, where it is expensive and difficult to install conventional wind turbines on tall towers. “It’s an early-stage concept,” the European Investment Bank’s Smyrnakis says. “But it looks forward to the future and it shows promise.”
Other future trends in wind energy include:
Stiesdal, who is now 67, plans to continue working on wind power innovation. Five decades after designing his first turbines, he is still full of energy and ideas. The big challenge now, he says, is to get wind power developers to further reduce costs, which would help the energy expand rapidly.
Wind power can and must be harvested to cover most of our energy needs.
“We need more wind power and we need it now,” Stiesdal says. “We need all the horses out of the stable, when it comes to fighting climate change.”