Spain is truly an international leader in the development of renewable energy and already produce the third most wind energy in the world and the second most solar energy. Despite this, Spain’s massive coastline has remained untapped as a wind energy resource, until now.

Last week the Spanish government announced that they intend to divest themselves entirely of nuclear power and in order to do this they would increase investment in wind power through installations along the 5,000 miles of Spanish coastline.

The coastline has officially been approved to be mapped out for all relevant factors for establishing wind farms including wind speed, ecological factors and boat traffic.

Earlier this year Spain brought attention to the value of wind energy when they set a record for wind power generation with 11,180 megawatts from a strong wind. To put it into perspective, that much wind power was enough to meet about 40 percent of all of Spain’s energy demands at the time.

Last night Spain beat it’s wind power peak performance record with 11,175 megawatts, breaking its record of 10,880 set in April of 2008.

Spanish wind farms also set a record for the amount of electricity they produced in a given day with 234,059 megawatt-hours – amounting to an impressive 26 percent of the countries power demand.

Spain has been one of the leaders in wind power growth along with the U.S. and China. Although it is dismally behind the greenhouse gas emission levels called for by the Kyoto protocol, it is working hard to meet them via wind power.

Currently wind farms in Spain produce approximately 16K megawatts, but the government’s aggressive foray into the wind power industry means that they expect that number to climb to 20K by 2010 and 40K by 2020.