“Tilting at windmills”

Whenever you can quote Don Quixote in the title of your blog post, you know it’s going to be an interesting one. Well, hopefully.

When I started in wind energy, around 15 years ago, renewable energy represented around 32,5 % of the annual energy production in Finland. It’s noteworthy that most of that was hydro power and forest-based biomass. Wind energy was growing but represented only 0,6% of the total energy production. Solar power was essentially irrelevant and modern energy storage solutions, such as batteries or capacitors, did not exist. At least not on an industrial scale.

Much has changed and in 2024 wind energy alone contributed 24,4% to the total energy production in Finland with renewable energy representing over 50% of the total energy production. In addition to the rise of wind energy there has been a fundamental change to the entire energy infrastructure of the country. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the significant energy import from Russia was ended in 2022, likely for a very long time. Luckily, the long delayed new nuclear power plant came on-line in late 2022 and ensured the stability of the grid. Without it, there would have been a real risk for rolling blackouts in Finland during the coldest days of winter 2022-23.

Similar developments have been ongoing in much of the world. The main drivers have been the push for carbon neutral energy production and early on strong support mechanisms that enabled the first growth sprints in the industry. As most of us in the industry know, this model of progress was far from optimal and led to numerous unwanted side effects, ranging from technological maturity issues to grid stability and energy market fluctuations. Some of these are more serious than others, but I think it’s fair to say that plenty remains to be done.

As far as I can remember, the current and upcoming political landscape has been at the very top of the list of talking points in the industry events. Even when political decision making did not impact on me our business directly, you could essentially measure the pulse of the industry from the amount of political chit-chat going on. For better or worse.

I think this is where the biggest change lies from 2011 to 2025. For example, if the current political landscape would have existed in the US in the early 2010s it would have likely killed the industry right there and then.

Reading the daily headlines today, you could image that renewable energy is pretty much dead and “drill, baby, drill” is the name of the game. But no, that is not what is happening.

The forecast is that renewable energy will dominate in the US too. And this is regardless of the current political hostility. The cost of building new solar and wind farms plummeted, and the ongoing AI boom will all but guarantee that the demand for new cheap energy is there. More renewable energy will be built not because of ideology or political decisions, but because it makes sense.

Robert A. Heinlein, a 20^th century science fiction writer, expanded the idea of Don Quixote quite nicely:

“Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills.”

With that said, there are plenty of difficult problems to solve. The previous graph gives a hint of one of them. The forecasted significant increase in energy storage over the next 10 years speaks the language – reliable, weather independent, balancing power is needed, a lot.