Issue facing renewables

While this optimism is well placed, there are still many issues that the industry needs to address. Even as a maturing industry, a large number of teething problems remain. In onshore wind there has been another year of losses for turbine OEMs with Siemens Gamesa explicitly stating that it has been negatively impacted by an ‘upward trend in the failure rate of certain components’.3 The downside of constantly pushing new technology with a view to reducing the cost of energy is that new models mean new methods and so just as operators are gaining expertise in one turbine, another is already being introduced.

While this focus has made wind extremely competitive against other forms of energy, combining new products with often tight deadlines has led to an increase in errors and lower levels of expertise among contractors. Battery storage systems have proved to be invaluable to their owners, but the industry must quell the ongoing concerns around the number of large fires. In the absence of standardized design, each BESS project can have its own idiosyncratic mix of modules, batteries and control systems, which means there is a lack of consistency. In both wind and battery storage operator error still happens far too often.