Five French wind farm projects, totalling 77MW capacity came online in February 2008. Project France phase-2 was a €115 million project constructing a total of 42 turbines. This challenge was undertaken as a joint venture by EOLE-RES S.A, a French wind park developer, and Renewable Energy Systems of the UK.

Mott MacDonald Ltd, a well renowned Global engineering consultancy, was appointed as Lenders and Owners Engineer for the project, which spanned three regions of France. In charge of due diligence as well as Owners’ engineer work for the project, Mott MacDonald was also present throughout the construction phase. Ron Donnelly of Mott MacDonald explained the increase in wind farm developments recently was “due to high oil prices there is more motivation for people to try to meet the low carbon agenda…investments in wind farms are becoming much more popular.”

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It seems that as for every day that passes more and more jobs in USA gets outsourced and shipped overseas to countries with cheaper labour. That’s why it must be great news for the people of Colorado in USA that Vestas, the world’s leading supplier of wind energy, has announced that they will “outsource” 1350 new green tech jobs to Colorado.

Besides one factory already being built in Colorado at a total cost of $200 the Danish company Vestas will invest $120 million in a new blade factory and a nacelle assembly factory in Brighton. Thanks to these investments a total of 2450 people will be on Vestas payroll in Colorado.

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The statistics are in for the first half of 2008 and they show that USA, for the first time, generated more wind energy than Germany. This “milestone” wasn’t expected to be reached until late 2009.

Germany still has more wind turbines than USA and is able to generate 22,000 - 23,000 megawatts of power compared to USA’s capacity of about 18,000 megawatts.

But Randall Swisher, the executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, said that “the difference is that because the winds are so much stronger here in the U.S. we are actually providing more wind-generated electricity than Germany.” He also said that the US “wind energy capacity is growing faster than anyplace else.”

This is great news but USA is still far behind everyone else in terms of green renewable energy, especially wind energy.

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It’s a brand new year for Europe, and for the European Union member states is has started with “tough” greenhouse gas emission targets being set. The new targets require that a certain amount of renewable energy will be installed in every member state. It’s different amounts depending on the size and ability of each and every country.

So how well are the different European countries doing? Well, that’s too early to say right now, but here is a list on the ten countries who have built the most wind plants in Europe last year:

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A Greenpeace campaigner from Spain has reported that wind power have broken all previous records in Spain.

A total of 13908 MW in wind capacity have been built in Spain. And because of good wind conditions wind energy in Spain reached 9563 MW of generated power. “Wind power met 25% of demand at that hour, well above coal (15%) and nuclear (16%). A new record may be expected today.”

As more investments is being re-directed from the fossil market to the renewable market and new technologies and improvements sprung up we will surely see more records and improvements in the efficiency of for example wind energy.

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