Author

Vincent Gautier

Chile: the Windy El Dorado, EWEC, Part IV

Chile is essentially a very long coast, with mountains in the back with nice people between the two that have set up the most stable state in Latin America. A great environment to install wind turbines. If you add to that the presence of enough local skilled workers, with a good safety culture – essential in the industry – that comes from the mining sector, and a good grid, then you would for sure assume that there are already plenty of wind farms up and running.

Well no. As of last December, only one was operational: a mere 18 MW owned by Endesa (of all utilities). The main reason of this seems to be the lack of a wind cartography.

03/31/2009 1 comment

Renewable Energy

Wind Power South of the Mediterranean, EWEC, Part III

written by Vincent Gautier

Wind farms in Morocco boast a 40% load factor, and the standard price for electricity is comparable to the European feed-in-tariffs. That looks like a great place to invest, right? On top of that, you can benefit from the Clean Development Mechanism and sell carbon credits. So why isn’t the market growth even stronger?

Well, the first issue is the weakness of the local demand. This implies that investing South of the Mediterranean is essentially an export business to the EU, which requires that proper power lines be in place. There you start to need international cooperation, which is always a slow process. Fortunately the Union for the Mediterranean was launched last year, as an effort to do just that. However, the implementation has been cumbersome because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

03/30/2009 3 comments

Renewable Energy

Offshore Wind Power, EWEC, Part II

written by Vincent Gautier

Developing offshore wind farms is clearly for the big guys, so what’s in it for entrepreneurs? With high CAPEX, high risk in the installation phase and then high APEX, this is not for your friendly neighborhood developer. This is still an early stage industry, with high costs and suboptimal technology, but the need and the value propositions are clearly there, and the EU just poured EUR 500m into it.

Allan Jespersen, Sr Sales Manager at Vestas Offshore, detailed to me the constraints to erecting an offshore farm and they are quite daunting. The North Sea being today the main market, Vestas is almost at home. But even then the rough conditions in which the turbines are operated (stronger winds, corrosion), the difficulty to access and the distance from the grid make quite a combination of challenges.

03/26/2009 3 comments

Renewable Energy

European Wind Industry Trends, EWEC, Part I

written by Vincent Gautier

The European Wind Energy Conference (EWEC) was held last week in Marseilles, welcoming 7,500 participants over 4 days. The whole industry was there, participating in a massive competition of glossy brochures and freebies, but also hard business.

03/25/2009 0 comment

Renewable Energy

Smart Grid: Technology is the easy part

written by Vincent Gautier

It seems new smart technologies emerge by the day: smart plug-in cars, smart dishwashers, smart coffeemakers… The future will be Green, no doubt about it! For all the praises I have for the engineers and scientists that make it happen, I believe that this is the easy part of making the power grid smart. Implementation of the transformation will be the hard one.

Scale is an obvious challenge. Developed countries’ power grids have been built all along the 20^th century, requiring titanic levels of investments. Upgrades, retrofits and greenfield additions will require a comparable level of efforts. And time. Lots of it. For utilities, short term means 5 years. For my generation of impatient go-getters, used to have everything a click away, grasping this relation to time is a challenge.

12/17/2008 3 comments