Europe - UK risks being left behind in wind surge

Britain risks missing its renewable energy targets as wind power developers struggle with planning objections and grid connections, according to a senior executive at GE Energy, a major maker of wind turbines. As part of European Union efforts to fight climate change, Britain must get 15 percent of its total energy supply from renewables such as wind by 2020. Although Britain has huge wind power potential, local opposition and sluggish issuing of permits have left at least 8,000 megawatts of projects mired in the planning system.

Meanwhile turbines are springing up like mushrooms in other countries that present fewer complications. "This is a global market place," said Magued El Daief, managing director of the UK energy arm of U.S. conglomerate General Electric. "Investors are going to go to the market that is most favourable."

Dozens more projects are planned but Britain got just 1.3 percent of its energy from renewables in 2005, while Spain got 8.7 percent and Germany 5.8 percent, according to the European Commission. El Daief said demand for turbines in these countries was still strong, while growing interest in wind power in Asia and the United States could leave Britain struggling to obtain the turbines that central government wants to see erected.

"Many of our customers have the choice...to either invest here or elsewhere...There is already a big market in places like China and India," he said. "In view of the supply-constrained market, investors will go to the countries where they have the best investment opportunity and the most certainty in the return on investment."

Earlier this month Julian Boswall, a renewables planning specialist at international law firm Eversheds, said local opposition to wind farms and the power cables they need to connect to the national grid was a problem in Britain. "There is a real tension between the national need for massive delivery of wind farm projects throughout the UK and the local politics of any given application," he said, contrasting British attitudes with wider acceptance of wind turbines in Germany, Denmark and Spain. Gamesa of Spain reported a 25-percent year-on-year jump in the number of turbines it installed in 2007, almost half of them in its home country and a third of the total split between China and the United States.

The world's biggest wind turbine company, Denmark's Vestas, has said it expects to announce strong profits. Nuclear Plans hopes that big European utilities will build a new generation of nuclear power plants in Britain, to cut carbon emissions and boost power supply, could also be dashed by growing global demand using up the necessary manpower and materials, El Daief said.

While Britain and other parts of Europe dither over the economics and politics of nuclear power, other countries are already building or committed to doing so. The pool of skilled engineers is finite. GE Energy has designed one of the four reactors being considered for Britain's possible new fleet of atomic power plants but interest is strong elsewhere, as nuclear power makes a global comeback.

"There is not a country that I have visited that is not talking about installing nuclear capacity, whether that's China, which is already doing it, or other European countries, or even the Middle East," El Daief said. "All technologies are required to meet the demand that we see."