The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) has recently published a report titled Capturing Green Recovery Opportunities from Wind Power in Developing Economies. The report, written in collaboration with BVG Associates, highlights the vast and largely untapped socioeconomic and environmental opportunities that could be unlocked by wind energy in a group of developing economies from 2022-2026.
The report focuses on five countries – Brazil, India, Mexico, the Philippines and South Africa – each of which face particular challenges due to COVID-19, but which have significant untapped wind energy resource that could unlock rapid economic growth under green recovery measures.
The five case studies quantify a series of impacts, which would result from pursuing a green recovery strategy, where public policy shifts towards the clean energy transition to accelerate deployment of wind projects over the next five years. This approach would not only support countries on their progress to meeting energy and climate goals, but would enable them to realise a range of socioeconomic benefits from long-term job creation to cleaner air and water conservation.
The total upside for green recovery measures across the five countries examined in the report include 2.23 million full-time equivalent jobs over a 25-year lifetime of wind projects, and nearly 20 GW of additional wind power installations – enough to power roughly 25 million homes each year from 2026 onward, and potentially save the equivalent of 714 million metric tons of CO2 emissions over wind farm lifetimes.
