02 March 2010
Sweden's government takes new steps to meet its 50% renewable energy target. Some 2,000 new wind energy stations will be constructed across the country in the next ten years, Sweden's enterprise minister Maud Olofsson announced in an opinion article in daily Dagens Nyheter Tuesday. "Sweden has extremely good prospects for rapidly increasing the production of renewable energy, especially from the burning of biofuels, cogeneration plants and windpower," Olofsson wrote in the newspaper column.This is yet another move to dramatically boost green energy produced in the country as the government aims to have an output of renewable energy amounting to 50% of energy needs by 2020. Today around 20% of Sweden's current energy production comes from renewable sources. Last month the Swedish Energy Agency approved an 14-million-euro investment grant to build the world's biggest wave power plant on the Swedish west coast.
The new turbines would provide Sweden with an additional 10 terawatt hours (TWh) per year. Within the same timeframe, Sweden would also expand its use of other forms of renewable energy like biofuel and solar energy to increase its total output from such sources by 25 TWh. That can be compared with a total electricity production from Swedish nuclear energy last year of almost twice as much. The minister also pointed out that Sweden today has the EU's highest proportion of renewable energy production.
Last year some 8 billion kronor (€770 million, $1.1 billion) were invested in 200 wind energy stations with a combined capacity of circa 500 MWs. The investments are more than twice as large as during the previous year and the expansion considerably faster than in many other countries. Last month Norway announced plans to build the world's most powerful wind turbine, hoping the new technology will increase the profitability of costly offshore wind farms.
0 comments:
Post a Comment