Where should the power lines of the future run? How many do we actually need? To answer these questions, the German power distribution agency Netzagentur is currently determining where and what types of power plant will be built in Germany by 2022. We already have a first surprising conclusion from this "Network expansion framework scenario." The share of renewable energies in power generation will be significantly higher in ten years than was previously assumed. "According to initial estimates, the share of renewable energies in net power consumption will be around 50 percent by 2022," declared a Netzagentur spokesperson to "taz” newspaper. Proposed legislation by the German government after the decision to abandon nuclear energy has long assumed that renewable energy would not be able to supply half of German electricity before 2030.

The networks agency has calculated three scenarios involving different levels of renewable energy expansion. According to the most likely scenario, land-based wind power especially will grow faster than expected. "There is plenty of room to catch up in using land-based wind power, especially in the southern German states," explained Björn Klusmann, Chair of the German Renewable Energy Association (BEE).

HANNOVER MESSE acknowledges this development by further expanding its Renewables theme park in 2012. "Many leading wind turbine producers will be here in April," said Oliver Frese, Senior Vice President of HANNOVER MESSE. The Energy fair's theme park will be supplemented by the Renewable Energies forum covering industry developments, technology trends, financing approaches and the political environment.

One forum topic is the future of drives technologies in wind power, which is currently at a technological crossroads. As was clear at the latest wind energy conference, EWEA Offshore in Amsterdam (29 Nov. – 1 Dec. 2011), offshore rotors are progressively reaching higher top speeds than onshore turbines, and their blades have a different structure, because wind turbines on the water are not limited by noise concerns. Drive designs for sea and land are therefore no longer identical – purely offshore turbines have arrived. "The link between land-based and offshore has been severed," noted Timothy Camp of the GL Garrad Hassan certification agency at the conference. "For large turbines of more than 6 MW output, turbine builders can no longer assume that they will be located on land."