In the offshore wind sector, the Netherlands took the lead for new additions in 2020 followed by Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, the United States of America and South Korea. [...] In terms of cumulative installations, the top five markets at the end of 2020 were China, the US, Germany, India and Spain, which together accounted for 73% of the world’s total wind power installations.3 Wind Power generated around 1,591.6 TWh of electricity in 2020, of which 111.6 TWh came from offshore wind and 1,480.4 TWh came from onshore wind.4 This amounted to 50.6% of the electricity gener. [...] While particularly wind power offshore installations display high load factors over the year and in several cases reach “baseload” quality, onshore wind energy cannot be made available ‘on-demand’ like energy generated from fossil fuels and therefore make it imperative to combine wind energy with efficient storage adding to the cost of delivered energy and linkages to an effective high voltage tra. [...] Technological development and challenges: Wind power offshore and onshore are expected to operate in the future with new large scale (10-15 MW) turbines in a utility scale mode or with much smaller ones in a more local, distributed, mini-grid or off-grid system in community owned systems and to overcome energy poverty in the Global South. [...] Floating wind power in marine environments are likely to add in the coming decade to the great clean energy wind potential, so are mini-wind and roof-based wind turbines.
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- Germany
