Four EU countries plan to speed up the continent’s green transition and help wean it off Russian energy imports through a large new project to build wind farms in the North Sea
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Four European Union countries plan to speed up the continent’s green transition and help wean it off Russian energy imports through a large new project to build wind farms in the North Sea, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Wednesday.
She said her country, together with Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, “want to increase our total offshore wind capacity fourfold by 2030 and tenfold by 2050.” The plan is to provide energy to 230 million European households.
″(This) means that we are able, the four of us, to deliver more than half of all offshore wind needed to reach climate neutrality in the European Union,” Frederiksen added.
She spoke at an event in Esbjerg, 260 kilometers (162 miles) west of Copenhagen, attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Scholz said the scale of the project “will be of an unimaginable order.”
“The North Sea is the place where, with the offshore wind parks, we can produce electricity on a large scale, in the large quantities we need — and can already do (that) today in a way that it is economical,” he said.
The new wind farms will be built along the four countries’ North Sea coasts.
Frederiksen said the project would help address the challenges posed by Russia’s war against Ukraine and climate change, both which, she said, “affect the European economy and the safety of our peoples.”
Von der Leyen, who earlier in the day presented an EU-wide energy package in Brussels, said the war in Ukraine “highlights the risks we have taken to be too…
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