Wind farms

In response to my letter of March 11 on the merits of wind and renewable energy technologies for Malta's energy future, Joe Borg apparently objects to wind farms because of their inconvenience, aesthetics and intermittency.

Many Europeans would also rather not have a wind machine in their backyard but will readily accept one if the alternative is an oil-fired or nuclear power plant. They are less concerned about inconvenience and aesthetics than with dependence on imported fossil fuels, pollution and global warming. The record heatwave in Europe in August 2003 that scorched crops and claimed 35,000 lives, along with news of melting icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica, accelerated the notion of replacing climate-disrupting coal and oil with clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy.

Few tourists who come to Malta are even aware of the Marfa Ridge and fewer still would notice any wind machines since they come here for other reasons. In fact, future EU tourists, now benefiting from the deployment of a second generation of wind and solar power systems, will be extremely surprised if there are no wind machines in operation in Malta, either on land or offshore and, equally, if the solar energy resource in Malta - three times that of northern Europe - is not reflected in the deployment of solar power systems.

EU energy planners are well aware of the intermittency of wind, that one needs backup capacity if the wind does not blow, but point out that one still saves on hydrocarbons and associated greenhouse gases and that new power storage technologies are being developed, such as fuel cells, that may well resolve this issue. (In fact, some new offshore wind farms are now generating more power than local grids need or can accommodate.) The configuration of a wind farm (or solar array field) matching a renewable generating system to local requirements is, in any case, a product of locally-developed wind and solar resource data.

Wind (and solar power) are now firmly part of the energy landscape in Europe. In 2003, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) reported Europe's wind-generating capacity to be 28,400 megawatts, expanding to 75,000 megawatts in 2010 and, with offshore capacity now being developed, wind is projected to supply all of the EU's residential electricity by 2020.

Upon joining the European Union, Malta incurs an obligation to implement Europe's policy of using renewable energy technologies for power generation. The issue will soon be not if but how to integrate wind, solar and other new and renewable energy technologies into the power generation mix in Malta.