The FINANCIAL — In Skra, Gori region has just finished the installation of the 10 kW wind turbine, which is ready to be connected to the central electric station of Georgia.
The wind powered electrical generator is the pilot project of USAID and Karenergo, Georgian Scientific Wing Energy Center. Scientists prove that in Georgia ,the last 10years,have considerably grown the speed and the frequency of the wind, which can be used as very important energy source.
“This is the first wind electic generator, which will be transferred to the central energy stations,” said Archil Zedgenize, Director of Karenergo. ”The prime cost of the turbine is about $25000. It produces only 22,000 KW energy per year, which won’t be enough even for Skra settlement. The turbine needs only about 2-3 square meter. Energy stations are very friendly to the environment. I don’t mean that small turbines and short term usage can be really beneficial, but long term exploitation will give us really best results. We will constantly have 100% clean energy.”
The project started in 2008, when Karenergo won the grant of USAID- the Energy Capacity Initiative Project.
”Till today we could manage to install only this one demonstrative wind turbine, because we don’t have any stable legislative bases for wind energy development in Georgia,“ added Zedgenidze. “We need an attractive legislation and tariffs for investors to get interested to invest in wind electric power stations in Georgia.”
We consume about 10 MW billion energy per annum. As Manana Gelovani, Leading Expert of Karenergo explained Georgia has 2000MW resource of wind on its whole territory.
“It makes 5billion KW hours per year. A 500MW Wind Energy Station will produces about 1,2billion KW hours. That will cover about 50% of energy that Georgia consumes,” continued Gelovani. “The optimal for Georgia will be 3MW turbines. As a rule, 1MW costs about EURO 1million. The number of the turbines is defined with the size and wind potential of the area,maximum from 10 to 20 on each mall. The most perspective places are the gorge of river Chorokhi,Paravani lake, mountain range of Likhi, the field of Mukhrani, outskirts of Kutaisi and west-eastern part of Tbilisi. Also, outskirts of Rustavi and the areas between Khashuri and Gori.
Tornike Gotsiridze, Energy Expert of the Energy Capacity Initiative Project complained that Government often mentions that the demand in the market defines need of any renewable energy in the Country.
“This is a wrong consideration of the subject,” noted Gotsadze.”In most of the western countries this non-traditional energy is developed with the help and support of the state. The turbine expenses itself is considerably high and it won’t be interesting for the investors to invest in the wind malls if they don’t get so called feed-in tariffs from the government.
So as it’s known everywhere, there are two ways to attract and interest investors either to set feed-in tariffs, or the government and state organizations purchase renewable energy. We don’t need to look for the examples in the Western countries. Even in Armenia was officially adopted the legislation to encourage investors to invest in renewable energy. As a result, nowadays they have a flow of investors for nontraditional energy in our neighbor country.”
The territory for the pilot project wasn’t randomly chosen. Skra is one of the windiest places, among others we have in Georgia.
“We chose the place because of its potential. Besides this is near the settlement of internally displaced people and we thought it would be kind of an advantage for them,” noted Gotsiridze.”The main idea of this grant was to test whether we have the wind potential energy experts talk about since the last 10years. In reality it was the hint for the government to become interested with wind energy. We recently received the letter from the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources that they want to continue the project we started.”
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