Windy day

Quite a packed day, but nothing overly exciting.

Probably the highlight was a visiting talk by the Vice President Jakob Larsen of Vestas, the world's leader and largest manufactuer of wind turbines for wind power electricity generation. It's interesting the way Scandanavians operate, compared to Brits. Serious, staid, zero humour, ruthless efficiency. I imagined myself making a big mistake to have Jakob bashing me over my head shouting "jaaaaaaaa". Maybe that's going too far.

But it's amazing the record so far for Vestas. There turning over some 4 billion EUROs a year, have installed 35000 wind turbines worldwide currently with sales of 4000 megawatts (4 gigawatts) in 2007. They've increased the efficiency of their wind turbines 100 times in 15 years and are aiming to install HALF of what they've installed in their entire history every year for the next 10 years. This amibitious target is being brought about by EU's target of 20% renewables by 2020, strong potential in China and the positive signals of the Obama regime.

He pitched it so well that I even thought of buying some Vestas shares. Indeed, if the politicans follow up with their rhetoric and a global deal at Copenhagen is agreed, Vestas will be one of the biggest winners.

There are some difficult challenges that remain though, with the intermittency of the wind the major drawback. Firstly technologies will need to be developed to store electricity that is generated for times when the wind is not blowing. Secondly, an integrated grid infrastructure is needed to support and complement wind with other electricity generators. The example Jakob gave was that in Denmark, approximately 23% of electricity generation is from wind. However when wind speeds pick up, other power plants are shut and Denmark can be 100% wind. Any surplus can also be sold to Norway or Sweden through integrated grids. When wind speeds are low, Denmark purchases surplus hydro generated electricity from Norway. Such an arrangement sounds so logical and more importantly works.

The positive outlook for Vestas may be the reason why they've sent a delagation to the sombre World Economic Forum, where Russia and China are blaming and bashing the US for global economic woes. It's pretty scary when the IMF projects that globally 55 million jobs will be lost....am I gonna be one of them? But maybe there will be light at the end of the tunnel for cleantech, it seems.

Well I certaintly hope so.