France – A new leader for green Energy?
Posted by admin | Education | Posted on May 12th, 2011
As the global economy grows and growing powers like China and India require more energy, countries are looking for ways to produce green energy and become much more efficient at energy production. France is trying to lead the way in green energy and has set some rather ambitious goals for the future. Even though there has been rather lackluster financial support of green energy projects in France, that isn’t stopping the country from moving forward with its goals to produce around 25 percent of its energy from renewable energy sources by the year 2020.
France is a country that has traditionally got a lot of its power from nuclear energy. It has lead the way in nuclear energy production, but now France wants to lead the way in renewable energy production. This shift from nuclear energy to renewable energy is going to cost a lot of money. It is this cost of switching from nuclear energy and oil that is slowing down the transition to renewable energy. In order to become the new leader in green energy, France must work out how to finance the transition.
France has currently already installed around 6GW of wind power capacity. They have a target of 19GW set for the year of 2020, which means they need to add about 1.5GW of wind power capacity a year to achieve this goal. Wind power is a very efficient form of green energy and can really help with France’s transition if they can get enough wind turbines put up. There was only 1.1 GW of wind power installed in the year 2010. It seems that a lot of wind turbine projects in France are held back by systematic appeals. These appeals can take upwards of two to three years to resolve and are hurting the transition to green energy.
Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, announced in January that there would be offshore wind farms that would generate 3.5GW of wind power, but they would not be available until 2015.
Another way that France is trying to go green is with solar power. France intends to have 5 million solar thermal units installed in buildings in the country by the year 2020, around 80% of these solar units will be installed in residential homes. Solar power is getting less expensive to utilize and should help France achieve its goals of going green.
France hopes to lead the way with green energy and they have a plan on how to get things done. The people of France want this and so does the government. Perhaps they want to keep their county looking beautiful so it can resemble Pulau Tioman and not go the way of countries that trash the environment for their energy supply.