Status and perspectives of renewable energy policy and deployment in the European Union—What is needed to reach the 2020 targets?

This article evaluates the status of current RES deployment, policies and barriers in the EU-27 member states and compares it to the required to meet the 2020 targets. The evaluation relies strongly on the quantitative deployment status and policy effectiveness indicators. European RES deployment and policy has progressed strongly in recent years, but the growth here has been mainly driven by effective policies in a small or medium number of top runner countries. Across Europe, the highest average policy effectiveness over six years was reached for onshore wind (4.2%), biofuels (3.6%) and biomass electricity (2.7%), while in the heat sector, all technologies score below 2%. Comparing the recent progress to the required growth for meeting the 2020 target, it appears that some countries largely exceed the interim targets of the RES Directive 2009/28/EC. Despite this, Europe will need additional policy effort to reach the 2020 target. Critical success factors include implementing effective and efficient policies that attract sufficient investments, reducing administrative and grid related barriers, especially in currently less advanced countries, upgrading the power grid infrastructure, dismantling financial barriers in the heat sector, realising sustainability standards for biomass, and lowering energy demand through increased energy efficiency efforts.     

Power loss in the upper cut‐out wind speed interval

Time series of mean wind speeds at several sites in Denmark have been used to estimate the power loss for wind turbines in the wind speed interval from where the operation has to stop at high winds to where a lower wind speed allows the operation to resume. For inland wind turbines the fractional loss is less than 0·25%. For offshore wind turbines it may be as high as about 1·5%. To facilitate the estimation of ‘dead zone’ power loss for offshore wind turbines, an engineering model for the sea surface state has been developed on the basis of a generalization of Charnock's roughness model and the geostrophic drag law. This model predicts the surface friction velocity and the surface roughness as functions of the geostrophic wind speed and the length of the water fetch. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Abstracts

Journal of the American Oil Chemists' Society -