4 EU nations to harness North Sea wind for green transition

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Four European Union countries plan to speed up the continent’s green transition and help wean it off Russian energy imports through a large new project to build wind farms in the North Sea, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Wednesday. She said her country, together with Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, “want to increase our total offshore wind capacity fourfold by 2030 and tenfold by 2050.” The plan is to provide energy to 230 million European households. Frederiksen said the project would help address the challenges posed by Russia’s war against Ukraine and climate change, both which, she said, “affect the European economy and the safety of our peoples.” Von der Leyen, who earlier in the day presented an EU-wide energy package in Brussels, said the war in Ukraine “highlights the risks we have taken to be too dependent on Russian fossil fuels.” The four countries pledged to set “ambitious combined targets for offshore wind of at least 65 GW by 2030,” their energy and climate ministers said in a statement. It said they also aim to “more than double our total 2030-capacity of offshore wind to at least 150 GW by 2050.” This, they said, would deliver more than half the capacity needed for the EU to reach climate neutrality.