Today's good news for wind power was that nine European countries including the UK, Germany and France have agreed to develop an offshore electricity grid in the North and Irish seas, allowing the countries to share electricity from offshore wind farms.
"The idea of a grid spanning European waters should make supplies of electricity more secure for the participating countries by making it easier to optimise offshore wind electricity production", the British government said in a
.
The project is also aimed at helping the EU meet its renewable energy target for 2020.
Today's bad news, according to wind power developers, was a UN climate panel's decision to block 10 Chinese wind farms from receiving financing under the Kyoto Protocol's
(CDM), which is essentially a way to make rich countries pay for emissions reductions in developing nations.
The developers fear the ruling will chill investors' enthusiasm for clean energy projects in the country that is currently the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases.
"The decision would have a severe effect on Chinese wind investment," said John Green, a director of
, a developer of wind projects in China. "Half of all projects could fail to be registered under the CDM, or possibly worse than that."
, another developer with about 10 Chinese wind farms awaiting review by the CDM's executive board, said the board had set a "dangerous precedent" and was sending "a very significant, negative signal to the market not to invest in these projects".
London's
caught wind of the development a week ago, reporting that the ruling hinged on the concept of "additionality". That refers to whether projects would get built anyway, without the economic incentive of tradable carbon credits issued under the CDM. Projects such as wind farms in Mongolia or solar arrays in the Arabian desert are only supposed to qualify for such support if they would otherwise be uneconomic.
According to the FT, UN officials were worried that Beijing had intentionally set its wind-power tariffs low to make it easier for Chinese projects to qualify for international support. Chinese officials said they had other concerns, such as limiting the amount of redundant wind power capacity developed in the country.
By some estimates, roughly 30 per cent of Chinese wind capacity is unconnected to the grid due to lagging investment in expanding the nation's power grid.
This squall will not pass easily, and it may presage further dust-ups over what should and should not qualify for CDM credits.
As
's
, the UAE is not optimistic it will win support for its proposal that carbon capture and storage projects should qualify for CDM carbon credits.
