Giles Dickson, WindEurope’s CEO: Wind farms will drive down electricity costs

euronews (in English)

Offshore wind farms are cutting energy bills, strengthening Europe’s energy independence, and powering industry with clean, locally produced electricity.

Transcript

00:00Wind energy is cheaper than the fossil alternatives.

00:05So the more of these offshore wind farms we can build, and the onshore wind farms of course,

00:10the more electricity bills will come down for consumers.

00:21Governments want more offshore wind because they can see it's affordable, it's reliable, secure,

00:28and it's local energy generated here in Europe with equipment manufactured here in Europe.

00:35These wind turbines were made in Denmark.

00:40We have heavy industry who are consuming lots of energy.

00:44They're knocking on our doors saying can we please build more of these offshore wind farms

00:49so that they can consume the electricity because they know it will be cheaper

00:52to run their factories on electricity than it is to run them on fossil fuels.

00:59There are some components in these wind turbines that are imported from China.

01:05Some wind turbines have permanent magnets that have rare earths inside them, for example,

01:10and there we are heavily dependent on China.

01:13Now the European Union wants to reduce that level of dependence and to source these magnets

01:19and the rare earths from other countries, and the wind industry strongly supports that.

01:26It's going to take us five or ten years, but you know, this is a top priority for us, yeah.

01:31Because we don't want to replace the old dependency that we had on Russian gas

01:36with a new dependency on Chinese equipment for renewable energy.

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