Europe To See More Than 144 GW Of Wind Power Capacity In Next Decade
New predictions from MAKE suggest Europe could see more than 144 GW of new wind power capacity commissioned in the next decade.
According to MAKE, this prediction is following on from a 13 GW, or 7.7% market growth in 2014 compared to the year previously, with Germany, Sweden, France, Turkey, Austria, Ireland, and Finland all setting new growth records. The European wind market is expected to grow another 8.7% in 2015 due to a need to take advantage of certain policies, which MAKE believes will lead to record numbers. Beyond that, MAKE is predicting the European wind market to expand more than 144 GW over the years 2015 to 2024.
While Northern Europe is predicted to account for 61% of that figure, MAKE expects Germany to account for 42%, or 37 GW. The UK and France are next in line with 15.4 GW and 13.2 GW respectively, as Northern Europe will likely reach annual demand of more than 10 GW by 2020.
In Southern Europe, MAKE is estimating 26% of all new European wind power capacity, with Eastern Europe accounting for the remaining 13%.
Turning offshore, MAKE notes that the offshore market throughout Europe accounted for 13%, or 1.6 GW, of all new grid connected capacity in 2014, with another 3 GW expected to be connected to the grid in 2015, which will increase to more than 4 GW annually by the end of the ten-year period, representing what MAKE believes to be a “key driver of growth in Europe” for the wind industry.
In addition to the natural growth of the offshore wind industry, MAKE points to 2020 renewable energy targets as being instrumental in driving European wind growth. However, the post-2020 dropoff being predicted across the industry is at least partly the fault of the lack of binding national targets, in favor of 2030 targets for the EU as a whole.
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That’s just MAKE believe!*
* I had to do that 🙂
You couldn’t make it up.
Do you know how hard it is to look up MAKE and find out what it is? Do your job and define your acronyms when you use them the first time!
As I haven’t a clue who MAKE are, the article is pretty meaningless.
You just have to believe this organization exists. I’m sure you’ve heard about this before. It’s called MAKE believe.
Did you find out what it is? If so, please enlighten the rest of us!
I haven’t been able to find anything online. Have launched a homing pigeon to the author.
Hi Bob
I know that you’re an active moderator on here.
I’ve left a lengthy comment up above; a detailed criticism of this particular article and its journalistic shortcomings. I’ve done so because I have been an enthusiastic reader of cleantechnica articles for some time and would want to see the site maintain a high standard of journalism. If the purpose of this site is the exchange of accurate information relating to environmental issues (specifically clean energy technology) then it is important that the integrity of the information be maintained.
If you think my comments are inappropriate, or if they would be better voiced elsewhere, please feel free to let me know.
Thanks
Rob
Ways in which any reader could have solved this on their own:
– Looked at the tags
– Searched Google
– Clicked on the tags
– Not assumed it was an acronym, and therefore not assume I had to define it
– Have been around the site longer than 3 minutes and seen the dozens of articles MAKE have been at the heart of
Apparently MAKE is a ” very well-known intelligence firm that is absurdly easy to find online” according to the author who has no time to deal with clearing up this issue. And has not time to edit his article to make them intelligible.
Apparently we all missed the MAKE and MAKE Consulting links in the tag line. (I looked over the article multiple times carefully and did not see them. Anyone else see them before today?)
It wouldn’t have mattered much if you had seen the link (singular). I just now looked at their website which is remarkably uninformative. They are headquartered in Denmark, so I suspect that “MAKE” is an acronym in Danish, not English.
Blah blah blah Press Release blah blah.
(I actually opened a Disqus account, after being a “read-only” visitor to this site for over two years, because the (lack of) quality of this article offended me so much.)
Please try harder.
I suspect that most readers come to this site seeking information, not speculation.
If you cannot provide well-researched or well-sourced information, then you are wasting my time and my bandwidth, and I am likely to seek information elsewhere.
Here are a few simple tips that might help you in future:
1. Don’t write a headline that contradicts (or exaggerates) the information contained in the body of the story.
In this instance, the headline implies that there is a high degree of certainty that some particular thing is going to happen. Specifically, “Europe to see more than 144GW….” of wind capacity over the next decade. (Presumably this means NEW wind capacity.) This degree of certainty might be appropriate if there were some sort of internationally binding agreement to ensure that it would happen, or if there were a broad consensus among a range of respected and well-informed people, or if a well researched and thoroughly peer-reviewed paper had arrived at the conclusion. But it transpires that it is simply someone’s opinion. Not cool. Clickbait-y. Bad journalism.
2. If you’re going to quote someone’s opinion, tell us who this “someone” is, and why their opinion might matter to us, or why it might be more trustworthy than anyone else’s opinion.
In this story, you refer multiple times to “MAKE”, but there is nothing to help us understand who this “MAKE” is. Or why their opinion should even matter.
Unless it’s “the Pope says” or “Obama predicts”, you’re kinda obliged to explain who it is that you’re quoting. Bad journalism.
3. To quote my physics prof, who stated it more eloquently than I could: “Bullsht in – Bullsht out”.
There is no point in posting a solution to three decimal places if the starting assumptions for your calculations are less accurate than that. The use of an exact number like “144MW” implies, to anyone familiar with the protocol, that there was very accurate data collection and a set of very precise and testable assumptions. Instead, someone just made a wild-ass guess, which you’re passing along verbatim. Bad journalism. An insult to wild asses everywhere.
4. Further to the B in / B out rule, there is no point in posting a long list of very specific percentages breaking down a number that was already a giant guess. The best one could go for would be “about a third” or “approximately a quarter”. It might make sense to say that a particular region accounted for 17% of capacity LAST year, if you have hard data, but you can’t simply extrapolate into the future. In terms of these percentages, you now have TWO different unknowns (total growth of market; market share) that you can only predict to within perhaps 10% accuracy. But combine them and you’ll see that the envelope of uncertainty widens to the point of near meaninglessness.
5. Grammar?
You said: “According to MAKE,
following on from a 13 GW, or 7.7% market growth in 2014 compared to the
year previously, with Germany, Sweden, France, Turkey, Austria,
Ireland, and Finland all setting new growth records.” That’s supposed to be a sentence, apparently. It’s not. If you can’t keep track of the meaning of a long sentence, just use shorter sentences.There are numerous other examples throughout this “article”, so many that I’m not even going to identify them individually.
Bad journalism. Actually not even journalism. Just bad. Lazy. And rude. You’re quite happy to waste the time of every single person that reads this article, but you can’t spend two minutes to proof-read before you post? Shame on you.
6. Back up your claims.
If you can’t be bothered to do so, at least expect your “source” to provide some background info on the data or methodology they used to arrive at their numbers. Otherwise it’s just a guess, and we don’t even know how well-informed that guess is. In other words, it’s NOT NEWS. Just because you receive a press release, it doesn’t mean you can copy and paste and hit the “publish” button. There is presumably an email address on this press release. Feel free to reply to it, with a number of questions. The sort of questions an astute or curious reader might be tempted to ask. The sort of questions that, if answered, might provide some context or weight to otherwise baseless claims. Do some research; the sort of research that might transform a press release into something newsworthy. In other words, do some actual WORK if you want to get paid. Bad journalism. Lazy. And greedy, presumably. Do you get paid for each “story” you “write”?
7. Tell me why this story matters. Or not. Preferably in the first sentence. Or better yet, the headline. Provide the context.
If an “announcement” is made, or a “prediction”, it makes a big difference where and how the information was disseminated. Something that was announced by a keynote speaker (during the opening of an international conference on climate change) would carry more weight than a similar statement from an unidentified stranger in the room, snacking on tea and biscuits afterwards. Any announcement is more important if it is announced by someone with an ability to actually CHANGE anything, or shape public opinion in some way, and in a way that it is likely to attract significant attention.
I would be more interested in the information if I knew how you’d gotten that information. For this reason, news stories often start with something along the lines of: “In a shock announcement made from the steps of the US Capitol earlier today, the leaders of the G20 nations issued a joint statement committing their nations to…. ” THAT might be worth reading further.
In contrast, for your supposed “story” about the growth of wind power, I suspect you simply received a generic press release. An email. An email from a company that issues such releases on a very regular cycle, simply to keep its name in “the news” and its website easily searchable due to the a large number of so-called “backlinks” that would favour its ranking on the google search page. There was no event. Nothing remotely newsworthy transpired. There is no new information available. In other words, there is NO STORY. Nothing actually happened, other than an email arriving in your inbox. If your article had stated that honestly in the first sentence, I would have given it the attention it deserved. Which is NONE.
You’re SUPPOSED to say: “According to XXXX, in a press release issued earlier today…” or whatever. So that we can discern for ourselves if the article has any relevance or deserves our attention.
Bad journalism. Ethically dubious. Calls the integrity of the entire cleantechnica site into question. Makes me suspicious of your motives, and less likely to trust anything else on the site.
8. Provide another view.
Okay, so this “MAKE” bunch said this. So what? Does their prediction match that of the EIA or the AIE or the IEA or any other acronymically named organisation? Is it much higher or much lower? What does Greenpeace have to say? And whose predictions have been the most accurate over the previous decade? Can we get a quote from someone whose name we might recognise and whose opinion we might respect?
This sort of comparison requires a minimum of research (a few google searches, at best) and can add significantly to the value of the “story”.
8. Reveal any conflicts of interest.
Do these “MAKE” people advertise with you? Do they pay you to publish these “stories”? Freebies? Clicking on their link in the tags reveals that they get mentioned a LOT by cleantechnica. Such frequent reference clearly helps their consulting business to build name recognition, and presumably also credibility. So they have a lot to gain, clearly. What do you get out of it? Is it just some free “content” to puff out your website. Or are other favours changing hands, whether to the site or the journalist.
ANY potential conflict should be directly disclosed.
That’s enough for now. There’s more that can be said, of course. But it’s not my job to teach you how to do yours. This is all really basic stuff. “Journalism 101” or “Journalism for Dummies”. Maybe get a textbook, or do a community college course, or just ask Uncle Google?
I’m sure you could educate yourself a little before subjecting us to this amateurish drivel again. I think you owe it to your readers to do so.
In the meantime, I will simply avoid anything online with the byline “Joshua S Hill”.
And possible a lot of other cleantechnica stuff too. Because EDITORIAL OVERSIGHT.
Sorry it’s a bit harsh. Use it; don’t use it. But please don’t insult your readers by publishing rubbish like this. It erodes the integrity of the brand quicker than acid rain erodes a limestone gargoyle.