Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) APAC Summit Takeaways

By Max van Someren

Over the past century wind power has moved from an eccentric hobby of rich inventors to a hi-tech, multi-billion dollar industry that is essential to achieving net zero and energy security.

Last week I was at the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) APAC summit. There were many great takeaways for me, so this list could be at least 30 points long (but then you wouldn’t read it!). Instead, here are three that stood out:

🏭 It’s a well-worn trope, but it’s true – the scale and pace of China’s wind roll out is staggering. 70% of all wind power installed last year was in China. Yu Zhang from Chinese General Certification Centre delivered a great presentation which walked us through the development of a mega industrial park in China for researching, designing, testing and constructing offshore wind turbines all in one location. We may never have the awesome scale of China’s wind industry in Australia but perhaps there is inspiration we can draw from their relentless focus on industrial co-ordiantion to drive down costs.

📊 Closer to home, Australia corporate customers for wind power are increasingly looking for power purchase agreement (PPA) structures that manage the inherent volatility from renewables. This can be either through the design of the project (combining batteries and/ or solar with wind sites), or through financial mechanisms to share the volatility risk between generators and customers. Gilles Walgenwitz from ERM delivered a great presentation on this subject.

👩 Projects live or die on the success of their community engagement. We heard about the importance of having advocates for projects within communities. The mantra “engage communities early and engage often” remains largely true, but this also has to be balanced against the long duration of wind projects and uncertainty on their outcome. Development is a marathon, not a sprint – and perhaps the community doesn’t want, or need, to be involved for the full 42km!

Why was I taking so many notes? Because our company, Bivios, is leveraging our techno-economic modelling and advisory capabilities to develop a multi-GW portfolio of renewable sites in Queensland. If you’d like to find out more, please drop me a line.

Images:

Left: Charle’s Brush’s pioneering 12kW turbine built in his back garden in 1888 in Cleveland, Ohio. https://lnkd.in/gVhvx8hV

Right: the Fujian Three Gorges Offshore Wind Power International Industrial Park in Fuqing City, southeast China’s Fujian Province. Photo from iStock photo. More information on the park is available here: https://lnkd.in/g_BF9V6s