Tilting at windmills: Spain strains to meet record renewables goal

(Reuters, 19 Dec 2018) More wind farms are set to be built across Spain in 2019 than in any previous year.

Wind turbine maker Siemens Gamesa is booking 14 colossal specialised cranes, has hired new staff and boosted capacity by up to 80 percent at its Spanish factories as developers strain to meet a 2020 deadline for cutting carbon emissions.

More wind farms are set to be built across Spain in 2019 than in any previous year, the APPA association of renewable energy companies calculates, surpassing a pre-recession boom in 2008 and putting unprecedented pressure on the supply chain.

"It is an enormous challenge ... We can really sense the urgency," Enrique Pedrosa Gomez, Siemens Gamesa's CEO for southern Europe and Africa onshore, told Reuters.

The Madrid-listed firm, owned by Germany's Siemens , vies with Denmark's Vestas to lead the global wind farm business.

Gomez says it is complicated but feasible for the industry to install the 4,600 megawatts of wind power, which - along with 3,900 MW of solar capacity - must be in place by early 2020 to meet the terms of government auctions held in 2016 and 2017.

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Reuters, 19 Dec 2018: Tilting at windmills: Spain strains to meet record renewables goal