|
|
Irish dependence on electricity generated by imported gas is so powerful a spur to new wind farming there that by 2020 well over a third of the country’s requirements will be met by wind turbines. Hugh de Lacy reports from the 2010 Wind Energy Conference held in Palmerston North.
Ireland already has 1450MW of wind generation capacity – about triple New Zealand’s – providing at least eight percent, and sometimes as much as 39 percent, of the country’s needs.But that capacity is set to balloon to 2280MW over the next decade as Ireland tries to slow its growing dependence on imported energy. About 70 percent of Ireland’s electricity eneration is by gas, and it arrives by way of the United Kingdom. “Essentially it comes from mostly Norway, but it’s on the end of the pipeline from Russia,” Walsh says. “Europe at the moment imports about 53 percent of its total energy requirements – it has very little gas of its own. Norway connects to the UK, but as Europe becomes more and more dependent on imports from the east, Ireland is essentially on the wrong end of that pipeline.” Accordingly electricity is expensive in Ireland: at €16 cents (NZ32c) per kilowatt hour, it’s about 50 percent more expensive than here. “Ireland is trying to get 40 percent of all electricity generation from renewables, which means 38 percent from wind by 2020, and that’s going to equate to about 6000MW, ” he says.
“The public view of wind [in Ireland] is very positive, quite progressive. It’s seen as a sign of progress and the realisation that we can’t keep importing fuels from Europe.” Fraser Clark, chief executive of the NZ Wind Energy Association, suggested in the joint interview with Walsh that opposition to windfarming here has lately become better organised, rather than reflecting greater numbers of people opposed to schemes. “Some work was done for us around the Manawatu that shows that the majority of people there actually think the windfarms are an important part of the landscape. It’s not actually a broad opposition: if you look at the numbers of people that appeal [against windfarm projects], and the volume of noise they generate in doing so, there’s the appearance of widespread public resistance, but they don’t necessarily represent the local population,” he comments. Clark points out remarks made to the conference by Marc van Grieken, a noted UK landscape architect, who said projects there adopted a much more robust approach to assessing a landscape before development was planned. “The next thing he was talking about was designing a wind farm to be as sympathetic as possible to the landscape, such as recognising the contours and scale of the land and its parameters. The challenge we have [in New Zealand] is that we don’t have, for one, a consistent agreement about what’s important [in a landscape] at the start of a project, and whether there’s a national or a local scale to it,” Clark says. There was a need to get everyone on the “same sheet of paper at the start”, he says. “And then we can debate from there whether the landscape is appropriate to the design, rather than where we’ve got to which is a range of different views at the start.” Clark conceded to “a high level of concern” about the implications of the Lammermoor decision. “Meridian went into that project on an understanding that the landscape had not been identified as ‘outstanding’, and it was the defining in the court that it was outstanding that led to all the follow-on things around alternatives.” Another subject of discussion at the conference was the greater maintenance requirement for wind turbines in New Zealand compared to other parts of the world, with Irishman Walsh noting that the wind here is “better: there’s more of it. It’s as if you’re in a car, and when you do more mileage you’re getting better value for your car, but you need to service it more often.” And this is was a good problem to have, adds Clark. “You get more bang for your buck, more yield. It’s not that [wind generation equipment] is breaking down any faster: it’s just that the components reach their typical lifetime earlier.” Walsh and Clark agreed that Ireland offered a good blueprint for the development of wind generation in New Zealand. “There’s the potential for wind energy in New Zealand to be huge and benefit the economy more generally,” Walsh said. There’s no reason why 20 percent of our electricity demand could not be generated by wind by 2025-2030, Clark adds.
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.3 May-June 2010 |
Speaking to Energy NZ after the Wind Energy Conference, Irish Wind Energy Association chief executive Michael Walsh (pictured) says that while the two countries’ electricity demand profiles were similar, there was far greater urgency in Ireland to expand wind generation.
Probably because of its dependence on imported energy, windfarming in Ireland doesn’t run into the problem of public resistance that it does in New Zealand – as witnessed by the recent rejection by the Environment Court of Meridian Energy’s Project Hayes farm proposal in Otago.