Brno - The amount of electricity produced by Czech wind farms is rapidly growing. Compared to the first quarter of 2007, the amount of electricity prdocued in the same time frame this year is 115 percent higher.

Last year, 35 GWh of electricity were produced between January and March, this year it was 77 GWh.

Thousands of households

Last year the production rose by 150 percent, the energy of 125 megawatt hours covered the electricity consumption of 36 thousand households. That would be enough energy to keep a whole city the size of Havířov, in Moravia, running.

Thanks to modern technologies, the Czech wind power plants are getting more efficient. "The results from the past months show that the Czech Republic has become one of the European countries that is able to use wind energy in the most effective way,"said Michal Janeček from the Czech wind energy society.

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Janeček says that the efficiency of the Czech wind farms even beats the German farms which have been the global leaders in this category.

"We are beating the leading Germany by 26 percent as far as efficiency is concerned. The newest machines in the Czech Republic are able to reach 36 percent of their production potential," says Janeček.

Wind farms in the Czech Republic are to be found in twenty different localities. Their total installed capacity reached 133 MW last year. The region around Ústí nad Labem possesses 30 percent of all of the wind power capacity in the country.

Gone with the wind

The experts assume that such a fast growth of wind energy will continue in the next years, the growth should even speed up.

Billions of crowns will be invested in building of new wind power plants. ČEZ, the Czech energy supplier, is planning to invest 20 billion crowns before 2020. New projects are also prepared by investors from Germany and Austria.

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Their opponents however say that many wind farms are being built in areas where the wind is not strong enough. They also point out that the wind turbines spoil the landscape.

The municipalities do their best to protect their landscapes. Recently, a wind turbine project was supposed to be built a hill in Slavkov, close to the battlefield of Austerlitz where Napoleon won one of his greatest victories in 1805, and many thousands of soldiers perished. Local authorities were able to stop the construction. The project, that should have cost 160 million crowns, was not approved after three years of debates and administrative hassle.