Wind Energy Counts Its Losses From Coronavirus

With the epicentre of the Covid 19 epidemic shifting to Europe and possibly the US, the global wind Energy industry is set o to take a big hit. According to research and consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie, global wind energy additions in 2020 could decline by 4.9 GW versus earlier projections. That means a drop from the earlier projections of almost 78 GW to 73 GW now.

“The impact of the coronavirus is top of mind for the global wind industry and embodies a crisis unlike anything the market has even seen. The state of the pandemic is evolving on an hourly basis, resulting in a highly reactionary environment,” said Dan Shreve, Wood Mackenzie Head of Global Wind Energy Research.

Besides the US and Europe, which have been strong markets for some time now, China, which had only emerged in the past two years as a strong market here too, is also badly hit.

European Tier I wind energy markets, such as Spain, France and Italy, could be hit even harder on a percentage basis due to more aggressive lockdown measures inhibiting worker mobility.

He highlighted how the Wind Energy market, unlike the solar market, is a much more diversified market in terms of equipment supply lines, something that enabled the market to pull along when the Coronavirus hit peaked in China during  January -February ‘2020. India, Brazil, Mexico, Denmark and more places have strong production capacities that managed to keep supplies going.

With the United Kingdom too going into lockdown, and with its especially strong wind energy market, we believe the final hit for wind energy could yet be higher. Perhaps the only saving grace in this period of gloom for the renewable energy producers facing delays, is that overall power demand is also slumping, so there is little chance that missed deadlines  will lead to increased dependence on other sources. In short, the overall march to a higher renewables share in the energy mix across most markets will remain very strong this year too.