A RECORD LEVEL of new offshore wind farm capacity was installed in Europe in 2023.
Wind industry association WindEurope has said that 4.2GW worth of new offshore wind farms were built last year, a 40% increase since 2022.
Additionally, €30 billion – another record figure – was invested in eight wind farms to finance 9GW of new offshore capacity in the years to come.
As global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise despite the threat posed by the climate crisis, renewable energy sources like wind power are a crucial component of plans to shift away from fossil fuels.
Ireland has onshore wind farms dotted across the country but only began the process of seriously developing offshore wind in recent years.
In 2023, without wind energy, Ireland would have spent an additional €918 million on gas for power generation, most of which would have been imported, as well as another €358 million on carbon credits for burning that gas, recent analysis found.
Wind farms in Ireland saved around 4.2 million tonnes of carbon last year – about the same as the amount of carbon produced by 1.9 million cars.
WindTrade has said today that the increased investment in offshore wind farms around Europe comes despite “legal uncertainty and unhelpful market intervention” that had previously “led to a drop in offshore wind investments, falling to an all-time low of €0.4bn in 2022″.
“It also means that projects which had to postpone their final investment decision in 2022 are now moving ahead – excellent news for Europe’s energy security and competitiveness.”
However, it noted that forecasts showing Europe will install 5 GW of offshore wind annually over the next three years is still “not enough to reach Europe’s climate and energy security targets”.
“It adds to the need to install more offshore wind towards the end of the decade. European countries will need to build 24 GW a year in the period 2027-2030 to reach the 2030 targets, but today’s offshore wind supply chain can only produce around 7 GW each year.”
The Netherlands, France and the UK were the European countries that installed the most new offshore wind capacity last year, including the 1.5 GW “Hollandse Kust Zuid” project in the Netherlands, which is now the world’s largest operational wind farm.
The Irish government has set a target of delivering 5GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Speaking to The Journal last year, Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan said that wind is “increasingly the cheapest form of power, so it actually helps bring down the price of electricity and gives us much greater security because we won’t be relying on imported gas from other distant locations”.
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