European Wind Day Opened With Call for More Renewables

European energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs has inaugurated the first European Wind Day by breaking a bottle of champagne against a wind generator installed in the center of Brussels’s European quarter and calling for increased use of renewable energy sources in the EU.

“If we want to reach the ambitious European target for renewable sources of energy we need to develop state of the art technology,” Mr Piebalgs said at the ceremony. “The wind generator installed today in Rond Point Schuman is a good example of this: it shows the citizens that wind energy is not dangerous and can produce clean energy in a safe and sustainable way,”

This is the first time that the European Wind Day, a pan-European awareness campaign promoting wind energy, has taken place across the EU, with the support of the Sustainable Energy Campaign and the European Commission. Its main aim is to celebrate the power, popularity and effectiveness of wind energy in the region.

The European Commission believes that wind energy should play a key role in the achievement of the binding target set by the European Council on March 9, 2007 to achieve 20% of Europe’s energy consumption from renewable energy sources. The commission aims to present by the end of this year a framework directive for renewable energy sources in which it will unveil ways to achieve this objective.