Hamburg (AFP) – Nine European nations vowed Monday to build up North Sea offshore wind power with the aim of boosting climate-friendly energy while reducing dependence on Russia and other foreign powers. Germany, France, the UK, and Denmark were among the countries that signed an agreement pledging to turn the North Sea into the “world’s largest clean energy reservoir”.
The EU’s Commissioner for Energy and Housing, Dan Jorgensen, said at the signing ceremony that the agreement was a “very clear signal to Russia”. “No more will we let you blackmail member states of the European Union and no more will we help indirectly fund the war in Ukraine.” The European Union has been scrambling to wean itself off Russian energy imports since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Leaders and ministers were meeting in the German port city of Hamburg for the third North Sea summit, after they pledged in 2023 to develop 300 gigawatts of clean energy capacity in the North Sea by mid-century. An intermediate target of 120 GW by 2030 was also set at the time, although experts have said this will not be met on current trends. The “Hamburg Declaration” signed on Monday envisages that 100 GW of the targeted 300 GW will be quickly delivered through an “unprecedented fleet of joint offshore wind projects”. That would be enough to power roughly 100 million homes.
According to the UK’s energy ministry, the new projects will include wind farms at sea directly connected to more than one country through interconnectors. The agreement aims to strengthen Europe’s “resilience” and “security of supply,” said Katherina Reiche, Germany’s minister for economic affairs and energy. In response to recent comments from US President Donald Trump branding wind farms “losers”, British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said that “offshore wind is for winners”.
Wind farms are “absolutely critical for our energy security” to provide “homegrown, clean energy that we control”, he said, adding that this energy is not under “the control of the dictators and the petro-states”. Jorgensen also addressed the issue of whether the EU wanted to reduce dependence on US gas imports in the wake of Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. “We want to trade and deal with the US on as many issues as possible,” Jorgensen said, but he added that “we are not aiming at replacing one dependency with a new dependency”.
“We want to grow our own energy, and our strategy in the future is to become free of gas.”
© 2024 AFP
