By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Feb 15 2007 (IPS)

Germany is blowing more wind into energy with the setting up of new offshore facilities. Germany already has the world’s largest installed capacity for wind energy.

By the end of this year, German researchers will have installed a new facility in the North Sea, some 80 km west of the island of Sylt. The experimental facility will provide crucial data on conditions a wind turbine must satisfy to function efficiently on the high seas.

The new facility, Fino 3, will allow researchers to measure the ideal dimensions of a wind turbine installed on the high seas, the strength of its anchoring, its impact on sea and seabed activity, and weather risks.

Two other Fino research facilities are already installed in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Fino, German abbreviation for ‘Research and Development Stations on the North and Baltic Sea’, is a joint venture of the technical universities of Kiel and Braunschweig, and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

Fino 1 and 2 are analysing the effects of wind turbines on sea flora and fauna.

“Fino 3 has been designed to stand up to 18-metre-high sea waves,” Jan Bachmann, coordinator of the research project at the Kiel university, some 450 km northwest of Berlin told IPS. “Such waves are exceptional, we expect them to happen once every 50 years.”

Fino 3, a 125-metre tower with about 100 metres of it above sea level, will also take seismological and geological measurements.

The information provided by Fino 3 will be used to install 80 wind turbines at the same location to generate up to 600 megawatts of electricity. This wind turbine facility, named Uthland, is expected to be functional by 2015.

“But our schedule for this project depends on the research to be carried out on the location,” Frank Richert in charge of offshore installations at Geo, a private company specialising in wind energy told IPS.

Germany has an installed wind energy capacity of 20.6 megawatts, that comes from 18,685 wind turbines installed on the mainland. This represented 5.7 percent of all electricity generated in the country last year.

Wind energy contributed to reducing German greenhouse gas emissions by some 28.7 million tonnes last year. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are believed to be responsible for global warming and climate change.

Research on offshore wind turbines is becoming essential for further development of wind energy, given the scarcity of sites for mainland turbines. Besides, offshore wind facilities are estimated to provide 40 percent more energy than similar installations on land.

Offshore production of wind energy in Germany at present lags behind Britain, Denmark, Ireland, and Sweden.

About 40 German offshore projects are being planned, with about half awaiting environmental approval by the German government. They are expected to be functional by 2030, and provide up to 25,000 megawatts of electricity.

That would represent roughly up to a third of all European offshore wind facilities, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). The EWEA estimates that by 2020 some 70,000 megawatts of electricity will be generated by offshore wind turbines.

German development of wind energy is driven heavily by moves to cut its reliance on foreign sources for energy. Germany imports all of its uranium for its nuclear power plants, and more than 83 percent of its natural gas.

German dependence on foreign energy sources became painfully evident earlier in January when Russia suspended its delivery of oil, following a dispute with Belarus.

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