Photo: NovaWind – News
This essentially meant the company had bought on stream 60 MW of wind power units whose construction had begun in July 2020. The farm, made up of 24 wind turbine installations (each with a capacity of 2.5 MW) will produce annually, on average, 147 million kilowatt hours (kWh), Novawind said on its site.
For the purposes of comparison, in 2020 a total of 13.1 billion kWh of power was produced in Stavropol region, according to data from the North Caucasus branch of the company System Operator of the Unified Power System.
“The fact that Russia is fundamentally a northern country, with cold, snowy winters naturally places limitations on the development of wind energy as a mass energy sector,” said Yuri Petrenya, general director of the company Power Machines and member of the Global Energy Prize International Award Committee.
That niche — in terms of geography – is the southern and North Caucasus federal districts where, according to data from System Operator of the Unified Power System, 90 % of Russia ‘s wind energy capacity is located.
Looking at the plans from Novawind, that share of the total could be even higher.
The Karmalinovsaya wind farm is just a part of the company’s plan to build wind power stations in the south of Russia. The first such station, the Adygea wind farm with a capacity of 150 MW was brought on stream in March 2020. Last December, the Kochubeyevskaya wind farm followed with a capacity of 210 MW.
Two Novawind sites are under construction – the Marchenkovskaya wind farm in Rostov region (120 MW) and the Bondarevskaya wind farm (120 MW), also in Stavropol region – construction got underway in August and November 2020 respectively.
According to Novawind’s website, the company plans to boost the company’s wind farm capacity by 2024 to 1.2 GW, which is more than the total capacity of Russian wind stations as of the end of 2020 (1,028 MW as estimated by System Operator of the Unified Power System).
A similar concentration is found in solar energy stations, which account for more than half the capacity in the unified energy system in southern Russia and 17 % in the energy system in Siberia – which includes regions with a high number of clear, sunny days (Altai – 250 days per year, Khakasia – more than 300 days). Eastern Siberia – just like the south of European Russia – is already one of the clear niches of development of alternative energy.
