Germany has come up with development plans for offshore wind turbine sites, eyeing 30 GW of installed power capacity by 2030, the Economy Ministry said in a Friday statement, according to Reuters.
The Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency’s (BSH) plan allows for even more wind power capacity, with adequate space for 40GW or even 50GW by 2035—although the details of the plan have not yet been shared.
One snippet that has been shared its plans to integrate Germany’s wind turbines into the offshore network of its neighbors bordering the North Sea.
“The BSH plan, alongside our offshore agreement of November 2022 (with states and power grid operators), is another piece in our master plan to reach the high goals for the expansion of renewable energies,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said.
The government agreed in 2021 to reach 30GW of wind power by 2030, and the country has plans to get up to 80% of its power from clean sources by 2030, Reuters said. Germany currently gets less than half of its power from clean sources.
The plans are ambitious and represent a quadrupling of Germany’s current wind power capacity of just 8GW.
In October, a German wind farm was dismantled to make way for an open-pit lignite coal mine at Garzweiler, operated by RWE. RWE saw three of its lignite-fired coal units with 300MW of capacity each fire back up in October after being on standby.
The Ministry for Economy and Energy Affairs of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia urged RWE to abandon its plans to dismantle the wind farm, and argued that “In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible.”
