14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that the government encourages and actively supports the development of wind energy, major companies have a hard time designing and implementing cost-effective strategies meant to decrease the costs of generating and providing wind power.
In order to deal with the prohibitive costs of their actions, Crown Estate has recently implemented a new project. Its ambitious goal is to make wind energy as affordable as natural gas, decreasing its price from the present value to £100/MWh.
Only time will tell if this target is realistic or not. The new strategy is part of a larger plan, which highlights the development of Round 3.
This denomination stands for new round of contracts which will have to guarantee that, by the end of this decade, one quarter of UK' s total energy demand will rely on clean, wind power.
In order to improve its new strategy, the enterprise will organize 15 workshops and will conduct approximately 60 interviews with the game changers on the market of alternative sources of energy, to identify the most approachable paths of decreasing costs.
The major bump in the road seems to be that a potential solution to the problem might intervene with another innovation. For instance, improving mass production can't be performed at the same time with constant improvements in terms of design.
It seems impossible to mix serial manufacture with the continuous development of other breakthroughs.
Either way, this industry has to choose between several options. The company has to establish its priorities, by coming up with the ideal package which contains the perfect cost-effective strategies that are able to work together in harmony.
"Let's say you've got 10 opportunities for cost reduction in the technology and 10 in supply chain, you can't use all of those together. You might have one pathway where you diversify the number of turbine designs and innovation allows... [you] to reduce the cost of energy that way. But another path might be to stick with a couple of turbine designs, and set up manufacturing plants that produce the same turbines over and over again, reducing costs on the manufacturing side. You can't have both," concluded Chris Lloyd, the development manager from Crown Estate.