By AFP - Agence France Presse
Autumn gusts push Finland's wind power to a new peak
Finland's wind power reached a new record this weekend, accounting for around half of Finnish electricity production, grid operator Fingrid said on Monday.
With strong autumn winds sweeping across the Nordic country, wind power turbines generated an average of 6.47 gigawatts of power every 15 minutes at around 8 pm (1800 GMT) on Sunday night, Heini Kanerva of national grid operator Fingrid told AFP on Monday.
“It was a record in Finland,” Kanerva said, meaning that around half of all the electricity used in Finland on Sunday came from wind.
As a result, nuclear and hydroelectric power production was temporarily reduced.
Although most of Finland's electricity comes from its two nuclear power plants, the country increasingly relies on wind for its energy production.
Wind power is the fastest-growing energy source in the Nordic country, and so these production records were expected, said Kanerva.
“It's a combination of more capacity, as new wind power plants are being built, and high-speed winds,” she said.
With more than 1,600 wind turbines, the maximum capacity that could be generated from wind power in Finland today is more than seven gigawatts.
In 2023, the share of nuclear power in electricity production was 42 percent, while 19.2 percent came from hydropower and 18.5 percent from wind power, according to industry group Finnish Energy.
ank/jll/gv
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