Swedish Industry has long enjoyed a worldwide reputation for advanced products and technical capacity, focused on extremely high standard of quality control in production and impeccable after sales service.
This also applies to the wind energy technology sector, in which Swedish skills and supply capability are highly rated in the world. Many Swedish suppliers of consultancy services and equipment have already succeeded in penetrating a fast growing world market.
The benefits of past R&D in the wind energy sector have been clearly demonstrated by the increasing sizes of turbines and the lower prices per installed production capacity of electricity. Production costs of wind turbines have been reduced by a factor of four from 1981 to 1998. Today, wind energy is cost competitive with other forms of electrical generation at locations with a good wind resource.
Wind energy growing market
The market for wind turbine generators is growing faster than the personal computer industry and almost as quickly as the cellular phone market. The Kyoto protocol has called for a decrease in the emission of CO2 gases. Using wind energy to generate electricity can play a major part in achieving this target. At good wind sites, wind energy is already competitive with new traditional fossil fuel and nuclear generation. During the past five years, installed wind energy capacity has grown at around 30 percent per year.
In this environment leading Swedish companies covering the whole wind energy sector have founded – Swedish Wind Energy Technology Group - under the aegis of the Swedish Trade Council.
Swedish Wind Energy Technology Group is an umbrella organization presenting the Swedish alternative and with the major aim to initiate, co-ordinate and administrate joint marketing activities for the group on selected export markets.