courtesy Vestas

The pace of development for offshore wind turbines in hydrocarbon-rich Norway has slowed to a trickle, as a backlog of 100 wind-farm applications queues up for regulators.

“The uncertainty has been and is bigger for wind and gas power,” a report by the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate confirmed this week.

Just four cases a year are processed by three key staff, and the torrent of applications for windpower and gas are, of necessity, also being slotted behind requests for hydropower concessions and new cabling. The few, big carbon-scrubbed gas plants are the only projects being considered.

Despite a push to get windpower in Norway’s oil county Rogaland, the region is being sidelined for central and north Norway, areas of notoriously sparce power.

“It’ll take 20 years” for today’s requests for wind turbines to be processed, officials told newspaper newspaper Aftenposten.