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By Ishika
Mookerjee, Andy
Lin, Christopher
Udemans and Adrian
Leung
There should be few
surer bets than India’s energy transition.
Electricity demand is forecast to grow faster
than any other major market next year, and the
nation is racing to meet Prime Minister Narendra
Modi’s 2030 deadline to add vast volumes of
renewables — roughly double the current total.
Yet the impacts of
climate change are making investors and project
developers wary. Rising temperatures are fueling
increasingly unpredictable global weather
patterns, which in turn risk upending
assumptions on power generation and
profitability for giant wind farms and solar
arrays.
A wind farm
off the coast at sunset in England. Photographer:
Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
Eversource Capital,
one of India’s largest climate-focused asset
managers, is prioritizing solar energy after
selling its holding in a power producer with
wind parks because of the potential negative
impact of weaker speeds.
“Wind projects have
underperformed,” said Chief Operating Officer
Prasanna Desai. Advances in technology haven’t
made up the shortfall, and upgrades to larger
turbines “aren’t having the desired outcomes,”
he said.
Similar concerns
are being shared globally, and particularly as
renewables account for an increasing share of
the world’s electricity generation — up to
almost 32% last year from roughly 22% a decade
earlier, according to Ember, a UK-based
energy-focused think tank.
To understand the
changing conditions for renewables, a Bloomberg
Green analysis examined average wind speeds and
solar irradiation in five-year periods between
2001 and September this year using Copernicus
Climate Change Service data. Comparing those
findings to 30-year averages shows wind speeds
have dropped most significantly since 2021 in
India, western China and parts of Southeast
Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines and
Malaysia. Solar irradiation has been in decline
in the same period across the Southern
Hemisphere.
“Climate change
does really redistribute the sources of energy,”
said Roberta Boscolo, climate and energy lead at
the World Meteorological Organization. “A little
change in the wind speed, it translates to a lot
of lost power.”
That’s led firms
around the world to try and get a leg up on the
changing climate’s impact on renewable
projects.
US-listed ReNew
Energy Global Plc is among firms to have boosted
weather forecasting capabilities, acquiring
analytics firm Regent Climate Connect Knowledge
Solutions Pvt. in 2020 and investing in a power
diagnostics center near New Delhi. Meanwhile,
billionaire Gautam Adani’s clean power firm
Adani Green Energy Ltd. has incorporated
artificial intelligence tools into day-ahead
forecasting to address weather risks.
Energy
Infrastructure Partners AG, which manages about
€7.5 billion ($8.8 billion) in assets, has been
working with a climate risk specialist on tools
to assess “future variations in wind speed and
temperature patterns for wind and solar assets,”
it said in its most recent sustainability
report.
“The industry has
to look at where to put the assets,” Boscolo
said. “Not only looking at the past, but also
looking at the future.”
Read the full
story and explore country-level data.
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data-driven journalism.
New
front in the war on wind
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By Will Wade, Kellie Lunney, and Josh Saul
The US is
suspending leases for five wind farms under
construction off the East Coast citing national
security concerns, raising fresh doubts about a
sector that has been attacked repeatedly by the
Trump administration.
The US Interior
Department announced the move Monday, saying the
massive turbines may interfere with radar
systems. Suspending the leases will enable the
administration to work with developers and
states to mitigate any security risks, the
Interior Department said in a statement.
Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum’s department announced
the lease suspension. Photographer: Will
Oliver/EPA
Shares of offshore
wind companies slumped after the announcement. Orsted
A/S, the Danish company that’s
co-developing the Revolution Wind project,
declined as much as 15.8% in Copenhagen. Vestas
Wind Systems A/S, the Danish turbine
maker, and Dominion Energy, developer of the
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, both
fell as much as 5.8%.
President Donald
Trump has long opposed offshore wind power and
began imposing restrictions on it within hours
of taking office this year. The policies have
led to numerous court battles, and a federal
judge this month ruled his ban on projects was
illegal. Citing national security issues
may be a more legally durable way to keep wind
turbines out of US waters.
“These towers are
gargantuan,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said
in an interview with Fox Business. “One can
understand how they would create issues for
radar.”
Offshore wind farm
projects raised national security concerns under
previous administrations, too. The Defense
Department under former President Joe Biden
pushed successfully for changes to leases being
sold along the West Coast to address some of the
issues.
The projects
impacted by the lease suspensions are Vineyard
Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Revolution Wind off
Rhode Island, Coastal Virginia and Empire Wind 1
and Sunrise Wind, which are both off New York,
according to the statement.
“The movement of
massive turbine blades and the highly reflective
towers create radar interference called
‘clutter,’” the agency said in the statement.
Orsted, Dominion,
Equinor and Vineyard didn’t immediately respond
to requests for comment.
Read more about
how Trump’s
ongoing war on wind is playing out.
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