Eastern Europe's new green army

Eastern Europe Energy

There is common belief among the more established EU nations that the new members from the East have a distinct apathy towards the global fight against climate change.

Granted, former communist states such as Romania and the Czech Republic are far from renowned for their policies on renewable energy, but that could soon change as energy giant GE has reported some serious eco-power action taking place in eastern Europe.

According to BusinessWeek, Rod Christie, General Electric president for central and eastern Europe, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic are all showing signs of strong future development in the renewable energy sector, but other nations such as Poland are still falling behind.

"There is more wind generation in Romania, who only started two years ago, than there is in Poland who started 4-5 years ago.

"Romania has implemented legislation, has a very good wind resource and we've seen what's now the largest onshore wind farm outside of the US being constructed there," he told BusinessWeek.com.

600MW wind farm

In Romania, the government expects to have a 600MW wind farm operational in the south of the country by 2011, as part of a 1.1 billion euro investment which includes 240 wind turbines produced by General Electric, made by the Czech power group CEZ.

With the rest of Europe making huge advancements in renewable energy production - in particular wind power - eastern bloc states seem to be coming round to the economic benefits of investing in and developing green-energy technology.

The global economic crisis may have spurred governments in eastern Europe to look for new investments to create new jobs, and putting cash into the green sector is the perfect way to do this.

Cumbersome Bureaucracy

Even more subtle steps are being taken to facilitate the transition to alternative energy sources, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic adopting a legal framework that allows for smaller independent generators - for instance using bio gas - to get on the national grid.

The nations have received funding from the EU 2009-10 "recovery package" to aid various projects, such as the retro-fitting of capture-and-store technology at a coal plant in Poland. But up to now, Poland have been slow in adopting such clean-tech ideas, due to general apathy towards renewable energy embedded in the Polish politics, and cumbersome bureaucracy making it difficult to gain permits to build projects.

But the entire eastern bloc has similar problems, if not to the same degree as in Poland.

If governments can get around the red tape, such as regional authorities having their own policies on renewable energy that do not correspond to that of national ambitions, then there is no reason why eastern European states cannot play a vital role in reaching Europe's emissions targets.

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