Bulgaria set for 10x growth in wind power by 2020

Bulgaria is one of the fastest-growing wind energy markets in the world, according to a new report today from the European Wind Energy Association.

Bulgaria has already doubled its installed wind capacity this year, reaching 330 megawatts—up from 158 megawatts at the end of 2008, according to the EWEA. The growth comes after Bulgaria tripled its wind energy capacity the previous year, up from 57 MW at the end of 2007, according to the Global Wind 2008 Report from the Global Wind Energy Council.

The EWEA said today it predicts Bulgaria's wind capacity will expand to more than 3,000 MW by 2020—representing 13.5 percent of Bulgaria's projected electricity demand.

If the projections are realized, the country will easily meet its European Union mandate for 16 percent of electricity demand to come from renewables by 2020. Bulgaria currently gets 9.4 percent of its electricity from renewables, the EWEA says.

That situation would allow Bulgaria to sell renewable energy to its neighbors struggling to meet the EU targets, creating revenues of €7.5 billion to €10 billion ($10.5 billion to $15 billion) by 2020, the Bulgarian Ministry of Energy said today.

Bulgaria's national action plan outlining its strategy to meet the targets is due to the EU by June 2010.

Bulgaria had 11.2 gigawatts of installed capacity from all sources at the end of 2006, the most recent data available from the U.S. Energy Information
Administration.

EWEA's Chief Executive Christian Kjaer said Bulgaria has an additional 8 GW of wind projects in the pipeline.

"If current planning and grid access barriers are streamlined, Bulgaria will soon be one of Europe's wind energy front-runners," he said in a news release.

Last year, Enel, Italy's largest electric utility, bought a 30-percent stake in a 1.4-GW pipeline of wind projects in Greece. The deal also gave Enel an option to participate in the development of a 180-MW of wind in Bulgaria (see Enel buys wind stake in Greece).

The European Union had 65 GW of installed wind capacity at the end of 2008, the EWEA says. Last year, wind held the largest share of new energy sources, contributing 36 percent of all new electricity generating capacity. 

But wind is not being uniformly adopted across Europe. Romania had 10 MW of installed capacity from wind at the end of 2008, prompting the EWEA in June to call on the government to fix administrative and other hurdles preventing or delaying renewable energy projects from connecting to the electric grid (see Grid problems slow adoption of wind energy in Romania).

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