This week, Dominion Virginia Power said it still hoped to build a couple of wind turbines off Virginia Beach. The federal government has promised more than $50 million for planning and construction, but the utility could only find one company willing to build the demonstration project, and it wanted far more money than the firm was willing to pay. Dominion says it will seek a new round of bids early next year.
Meanwhile, a tiny country in Europe is on track to build 150 wind turbines off its coast.
Estonia is one of three Baltic states that sit between Russia and Western Europe on the coast of a shallow sea that’s calm enough to invite installation of wind turbines.
“You can work if the wave height is less than 1.5 meters, and this area the wave heights which are higher than 1.5 meters are quite rare.”
That’s Martin Kruus, CEO of 4Energy, a company that has already built enough onshore wind farms to power 110,000 homes and has ten times as many under construction or on the drawing board. It’s not that Estonia lacks other ways to produce electricity or heat its homes.
Just across the river from Russia, in Estonia’s far northeast corner, sits the largest shale operation in the world, removing oil and gas to supply 85% of the nation’s energy. There’s enough rock here to power Estonia for a hundred years. What’s more, half of Estonia is covered in forests, so Timo Tatar, director of Energy at the Ministry of Economic Affairs says there’s plenty of wood to burn.
“All in all, I can say that Estonia is the least import-dependent country in all of the EU.”
But it does still import some Russian gas, and Rene Tammist, director of the Estonian Renewable Energy Association, says that’s an uncomfortable situation when winter temperatures drop well below zero.
“Until recently, almost 75% of the heat was produced from Russian gas, and Russia has proven that it is willing to disrupt energy supplies in case it doesn’t achieve its political goals.”
And after decades of occupation by the Soviet Union, Estonia would like nothing better than to cut all ties.
These school kids learn about Estonia’s singing revolution, which began in 1987. Rather than risk further violence and repression, citizens demanded their freedom in song. They gathered to chant and joined with neighbors in Lithuania and Latvia to form a chain of a million people protesting Soviet occupation. In the early 90’s, as the Soviet Union fell apart, Russian troops left without bloodshed.
Today Estonia is a member of the European Union, an organization that’s very much worried about climate change, and Energy Director Tatar says the pressure is on to ditch fossil fuels and go green.
“Obviously oil shale is not the ultimate solution for Estonia, but while the renewable energy technologies are getting cheaper, and it’s developing then it serves as a good bridge.”
In the area around Estonia’s shale oil plants, you can believe that. Huge mounds of light brown ash are left after oil and gas are extracted from the rock, but trees and grasses have started growing on those mini-mountains, attracting birds and small animals that appear to live in harmony with 17 giant wind turbines.
In our next report, we’ll visit the island where Estonia hopes to launch its offshore wind industry, find out what challenges remain and learn how those problems could be solved long before Virginia builds its first two turbines.
Sandy Hausman reported from Estonia with the support of an Energy and Climate Media Fellowship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
