Germany approves huge offshore wind farms

Germany's cabinet has approved plans for a further 40 North Sea and Baltic wind farms. The special zones will be dedicated to the wind-parks off its northern coast, and could provide electricity for over eight million homes and provide 30,000 jobs.

The plan involves setting aside zones between 12 and 200 kilometers (seven and 124 miles) off its northern shores. Of the 40 wind farms, 30 would be in the North Sea and 10 in the Baltic Sea. Of these, 25 have already received approval - 22 in the North Sea and three in the Baltic Sea, reports BusinessWeek.com.

In total, the farms would house up to 2,500 wind turbines, generating around 12,000 megawatts by 2030. German Federal Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said, "From our planned farms in the North Sea alone, we could provide 6.8 million additional homes with electricity."

Germany is continuing its drive forward with wind energy, and hopes the latest projects will double the amount of energy generated by wind to 12 percent by 2020. By 2030, Germany hopes to be getting 30 percent of its power from renewable sources. However, despite such commitment to renewable energy from the German government, environmentalists accuse the cabinet of being slow to act on the nation's wind power potential. Critics point out that plans to boost Germany's offshore power production have been in discussion since the beginning of the decade. In 2002, a coalition led by then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, passed the German government's strategy on offshore wind energy development.

Felix Matthes, coordinator for energy and climate protection at the Institute for Applied Ecology in Berlin said the current government has done "too little, too late to advance things decisively now."

Many obstacles still lie between the latest project's conception and construction. The maintenance costs of such a large-scale project far out at sea, where the sea is deep and the waves high, are extremely high - and even getting the turbines out there in the first place presents difficulties. "The construction of a wind farm will easily consume between €500 million and €1 billion ($735 million to $1.47 billion)," Hermann Albers, the president of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE), told Spiegel Online.

Supporters of the wind parks argue that the power generated, and saving in cost from the turbines will eventually offset the initial high costs of the project.

Yet there is another, more serious issue. Once again, issues surrounding the connection of the wind-generated power to the national grid present a big problem. This in turn deters potential investors, and power companies will be reluctant to lay cables out at sea to connect the wind farm to their grids without the guarantee that the project has financing. But what completes this vicious cycle is that before investors put up their cash, they want a guarantee from power companies that the wind farm will be connected to the grid.

This can alienate many investors, meaning only the very largest show interest, which will slow down the progress of green projects. According to Albers, so far, around 70 percent of investment in the 25 approved wind farms comes from these large companies.

There is also a concern within Germany that if heavy investment in renewable energy continues to grow whilst the nations till relies on its traditional power sources, then they could encounter problems in the future. Hans-Josef Fell, the energy spokesman for the Green Party in Germany says, "if these gigantic wind farms start up out at sea while German nuclear reactors are still working, then we will have a huge excess of energy.

"Power prices will collapse-and the bottom line is that wind power will be less profitable than it should be."

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