The number of wind parks along Bulgaria's northern Black Sea coast is already bigger than the number of trees in the same area. The natural absence of any trees in those areas and the high winds makes it the best place in Bulgaria to produce green energy from wind generators.

About 60 wind turbines have already been built in Kavarna municipality, a town hall spokesman told The Sofia Echo by telephone on August 26. They have been issued permits by the regional branches of the National Construction Control Directorate in Sofia and Dobrich, Vesselin Ganchev from Dobrich municipality, who keeps the records of permits issued, said.

Thirty-five of those 60 generators are owned by Kaliakra Wind Power (KWP), a joint venture between Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Bulgarian company Inos 1. A number of companies and private bodies own the rest of the wind generators in Kavarna municipality.

MHI owns 70 per cent in KWP, established in Sofia in late 2005, and the rest are held by Inos 1. The total investment in KWP wind farm was 53 million euro, company officials said at the official opening of the wind park in July, with 37 million euro borrowed from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and Mizuho Bank using certificates for reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as collateral in 2007, SeeNews corporate wire reported.

KWP sells the electricity produced near Cape Kaliakra in Kavarna municipality to the state-owned power grid operator National Electricity Company (NEK), MHI said on a statement on its website on August 7. "The Kaliakra wind power generation and sales project has been planned as a Japanese-Bulgarian joint implementation project to reduce greenhouse gases sanctioned under the Kyoto [Protocol] framework," MHI said. According to the company, the project will simultaneously contribute to the promotion of renewable energy utilisation in Bulgaria and to the acquisition of credits based on emission reduction units by Japan.

The KWP wind farm has capacity to generate 35MW of electricity. The wind turbines, each with rated power output of 1MW, were made at MHI's Nagasaki Shipyard and Machinery Works and Yokohama Machinery Works, the company said.

In late July 2008, another company applied for permits to build wind generation facilities. This was AES Geo Energy, majority-owned by US energy firm AES Corporation and local company ICS. AES Geo Energy wants to build a 201MW wind farm in the Kavarna area. The six-ha footprint of the wind park is made up of company-owned and municipal plots. The investor will first install 51 wind turbines with a combined capacity of 156MW. A further 15 turbines would be added during the second phase of the project. The facility should be operational by 2010. Locally-owned ICS would install four wind turbines with a total capacity of 12MW. The project is due for completion by July 2010 and would be financed by Eurobank EFG Bulgaria.

One Bulgaria's three electricity distribution firms, E.ON Bulgaria, the local subsidiary of German corporation E.ON, also plans to invest in electricity production using renewable energy sources, but it is yet to build its first wind generator. The company designed a project for wind generators in Shabla area, which is in the northern part of Kavarna municipality. The plan is for the wind turbines to occupy 900ha of land. The wind park's capacity would be between 75MW and 130MW.

Further south, Karnobat municipality, near the southern Black Sea city of Bourgas, is gearing for a wind park as well. Municipal authorities have called a tender for an investor to build a wind power generation park on 490 ha of municipal land and a solar park on 80 hectares, SeeNews reported in June, with an investor expected to be selected by September. Spain's Preneal and Germany's Plambeck were reported to be among the dozen potential bidders.

There appears to be no shortage of companies wanting to build similar facilities inland, away from the sea. In mid-August, Vestas Windsystems, a leading Danish company specialising in the production of wind turbines, announced plans to invest in the area of the biggest Bulgarian Danube city of Rousse, website investor.bg reported. Currently, the company is analysing possibilities for bringing their concept of renewable electricity production to Bulgaria, investor.bg quoted town hall officials as saying. Vestas Windsystems was looking to either buy or rent  land between 10 and 15ha along the Danube River coast for its prospective investment. According to company statistics, Vestas Windsystems holds 23 per cent share from the wind turbines world market, with more than 35 000 turbines installed in 60 countries.

But the strong air streams that make Bulgaria, and the northern stretch of its Black Sea coast in particular, such an attractive proposition for wind-farm investors, are also indirectly the biggest cause of criticism levelled at their facilities. The winds shape the Via Pontica birds migration route and Bulgarian bird protection associations and environmentalists are against wind farms being built in areas like Cape Kaliakra in Kavarna municipality, although they produce electricity from renewable energy sources that does not pollute the environment.

Earlier in 2008, the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds said that it had alerted the European Commission about what it believed to be infringements of the Europe-wide network of protected sites Natura 2000. The complaint filed by the NGO said that unique natural habitats in the northeastern Kaliakra region had been destroyed in the process of building wind farms. The complaint was backed by 12 other environmental and civil NGOs. The environmentalists believe that Kaliakra "is emblematic of how innovations and investment are used to mask criminal encroachment on bio-diversity". The complaint package included documents, photos and maps showing the damage that the wind farm projects have done to nature.

Bulgaria has to generate at least 11 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2010 and 16 per cent by 2020 under commitments made to the European Union.