Jan 18 2011
Global Industry Analysts (GIA), a market research company established in 1987 has released a new report titled “Wind Energy: A Global Strategic Business Report” on the global wind energy market.
Rapidly depleting natural resources along with sky high prices of oil imports and extremely high energy bills are slowly but steadily forcing a transition towards clean and renewable energy sources worldwide. Out of the list of clean energy resources available, wind and solar have proved to be the most cost-effective solutions, which would help to solve the global energy crisis.
Wind power market is expected to survive all the uncertainties, which the energy market is facing currently, and also many other structural and competitive challenges. Countries worldwide have set targets of meeting 12% of the electricity requirements from wind energy by 2020. Market forecasts are increasingly favoring wind energy due to the transformed governmental policies, cumulative increment in new installations, addition of vibrant new power plants and strategic development in the wind energy sector. If wind energy is to compete with other conventional energies, its price should be reduced by almost 30-50%. This cost reduction could be achieved by conducting R&D activities and also arranging for suitable funding.
The renewable energy market is to generate more than 2000 TWh of electricity to meet 20% of power demands in the world, and this would lead to reduction in CO2 emissions to the tune of 1500 million tons in 2020. China has emerged as the biggest wind power with a 14 GW capacity in 2009, surpassing the US. Several companies attracted by the rising growth prospects in the Asian countries have expanded their operations to include India and China. India, China and the US are focused on developing onshore wind projects while UK and Northern Europe are developing offshore wind projects across the North Sea. Offshore wind projects would outpace wind turbines based on land by 2015.
The report reveals that Europe still remains the single largest market for wind energy, followed closely by the US and the Asia Pacific countries. The profiles of the key market participants included in the report are AES, American Electric Power, Enel SpA, Cielo Wind Power, Green Mountain Energy, GE Energy, NextEra Energy Resources, Suzlon Energy, Shell WindEnergy, Vestas Wind Systems and Trans Alta Wind. The report also provides a detailed review about product innovations, industry overview, growth drivers, market trends, profiles of global market players and recent industry activity. Annual capacity additions and installed wind energy capacity in terms of megawatts are also provided along with analytical data for the period 2007-2015, as also market evolution over 2000-2006. The major geographic markets worldwide have also been analyzed and overviewed in depth.