Recent years have certainly seen a widespread acceptance of its principles and integration of environmental, societal, inter-generational and intra-generational concerns into mainstream policies by international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU).

In the path towards Sustainable Development, the issues surrounding energy occupy a prominent position. It is now acknowledged that we need to address the problem of Climate Change, widely regarded as probably the biggest challenge facing the international community. Moving towards a more responsible management of natural resources, which include finite energy resources, is seen a necessary step to avoid their irremediable depletion. The need to secure a reliable and stable energy supply in a world burdened by ever growing demand is a priority for most countries. Finally, but not less importantly, the fight against poverty and exclusion also rests upon making energy available to those living on the periphery, both geographically and economically.

The necessity to address these problems, common to the OECD as well as to the emerging economies and developing countries, calls for a concerted and forward-thinking approach at the international level with Treaties and Conventions, but also by tackling the national economic, energy and environmental policies in an integrated way. The challenges are huge and demand a strategic vision.

Dependence on foreign imports predominantly from geo-politically unstable areas, in the current high-price scenario for oil and in the highly volatile one for natural gas, is a growing concern for many countries whose domestic production is insufficient to meet their increasing needs. Power generation from fossil fuels is among the main sources of climate change causing greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other forms of pollution. Inaction on such a potentially catastrophic issue is no longer a viable option under the current circumstances. The creation of low carbon economies coupled with energy efficiency and conservation is the answer and the development of renewable energy generation must play an important role.

Renewable energy is generated by energy flows that occur naturally and continuously in the environment. These resources are essentially infinite: winds, tides, waves, the heat from the sun will not cease. The main challenge that faces us is in finding an economic way of harnessing this energy and transforming it into more useful forms. The carbon footprint of most renewables is virtually non-existent: other than emissions created in the manufacture, transportation, deployment and final decommissioning of its installation. Essentially there are no GHG emissions from these forms of energy generation and the fuel used is sourced locally to the generating station and at zero cost.

Whilst not the only solution to the problems discussed above, renewable energy is part of the answer to all of them. An energy mix including a significant contribution from renewables is both economically viable and environmentally necessary.

When the wind blows, the rotor spins and transmits the movement through a shaft inside the nacelle (the large housing compartment extending back from the nose-like centre of the blades) into a gearbox (in the absence of a gearbox it conveys the power using direct drive) that in turn increases the rotation speed conveyed to a generator. The generator, using magnetic fields, converts the rotation into electrical energy at around 700 Volts. This energy then goes into a transformer that converts the output to the voltage necessary for electricity to be fed into the distribution system. The instruments that measure the speed and the direction of the wind on top of the nacelle cause the turbine to turn in order to face the wind. Finally, there is a braking system able to switch the rotor off when wind speeds are too high or too low.

The extremely fast technological progress experienced in the wind industry has led from the 25 kW machines of the early years to exponentially grow to the standard of 600 to 2,500 kW of the present time. Turbines in excess of 3 MW are already commercially available (seven 3,6 MW turbines have been installed in the first phase of the Arklow Banks development, offshore Ireland) and prototypes of up to 5 MW are currently being developed.

The overall available wind resource technically recoverable worldwide is estimated at 53,000 Terawatt hours (TWh) per year, larger than twice the global projected electricity demand of 25,578 TWh for year 2020, as estimated in year 2002 by the International Energy Agency (IEA). A joint Greenpeace/EWEA (European Wind Energy Association) study first released in 2002, "Windforce 12", outlines a scenario in which 12% of the global electricity demand by year 2020 could be provided by wind power. In terms of installed capacity, this equates to 1.25 million MW (an output in excess of 3,000 TWh) and would displace 10,771 MM tonnes of C0².