Governments are becoming more actively involved and the state backed interventions to meet EU 20-20-20 target are definitively needed. EU targets are technically available, but the current technology is still highly priced. Finland finally proposed two weeks ago a feed-in tariff for wind power of EUR 83.5/MWh. The guaranteed price for wind power is to be introduced in early 2010 for a period of 12 years. Governments target is to increase the production of wind power to 6 TWh, i.e. by almost 30 times by the year 2020 (current production level approximately 0.2 TWh). Implementing the wind feed-in tariffs in early 1980-1990’s countries like Denmark, Germany and Spain boosted a growth of the global wind power players like Vestas, Enercon and Gamesa. Finland has somehow a missed a train as financing the wind farms is becoming more to preserve of project finance and VC’s are now focusing more on advancements on power and turbine technologies.
Innovative bio-ethanol producer and distributor St1, launched (Link In Finnish) to a set up a joint wind power company TuuliWatti Oy with a Finnish and Baltic retailer S-Group. The target is to build up for the first 5 – 10 wind power plants in 2010 in Finland. S-Group is among the 10 largest energy consumer in Finland and has instance supermarket and fuel distribution on the portfolio. Remembering that St1 has an own technology to produce the bio-waste to ethanol at a competitive 35 cents per litre, I won’t be surprised if we read about the deepened co-operation into waste to energy production in future.
