Wind News Update: Denmark’s Anti-Wind Problem

Denmark, the tiny European state much ballyhooed as the gold standard for wind-power deployment, has big energy goals. The Danish government set the target of sourcing half of its electricity from wind by 2020 and transitioning entirely off fossil fuel by 2050. In order to get there, Denmark needs to build a lot more wind. Last year, 38 percent of its total electricity consumption was met with wind power, down from 42 percent the year before.

So, reaching its goals won’t be easy. According to a 3-year, $3.1 million study by Danish Council for Strategic Research, Denmark has an “Anti-Wind problem.

Denmark’s Installed Wind

Denmark’s accumulated installed wind in the period from 2007 to 2016 grew by just 2.1 GW bringing the total wind capacity to 5.2 gigawatts (GW) including 1.28 GW offshore. In comparison, the United States installed 65.5 GW in that same period—a 31-fold increase—for total installed wind of 82.2 GW. Denmark decommissioned more turbines in eight of the last ten years than it installed.

Source: Danish Energy Agency

 Public Resistance and the Wind2050 Report

To be fair, Denmark is a small country, with a land area that’s 1.25x the size of Maryland. Limited space (and a government fixated on meeting its aggressive energy goals) has triggered massive public opposition to turbine projects. See here, here and here.

Recognizing that wind power opposition could disrupt the deployment of more wind turbines, the Danish government funded Wind2050, an initiative tasked with understanding the growing resistance to wind energy in Denmark and how to increase community acceptance.

Four briefs[1] were released this year, two in May and two in June.

The following statements from ‘Policy Brief #4’ make clear that Danish citizens strongly object to wind power facilities in their communities.

The massive resistance to wind turbines will not only have an impact on the political objective of 50% of Danish production coming from wind turbines by 2020, but in the long run, resistance can affect the direction Denmark takes in achieving its Green conversion. In order for this goal to be met, it may be necessary to undertake a different planning process. There is evidence that the planning process itself promotes the resistance of citizens by the way it is organized.

The Brief goes on to state:

This investigation shows that there is great distrust in the municipalities. Citizens feel that the municipalities mainly think of the financial benefits and subsidies from the state, and that they [city officials] cooperate with wind project developers at the expense of local citizens. … In addition, the public process involves project builders at a very early stage and before they actually have formal approval for their project. Early land purchases give rise to the concern that the decision on the wind project has already been made in advance and that citizens have no say even before the participation process has actually started.

Policy Brief #5 discusses how Denmark’s transition to a more competitive market pricing scheme has resulted in projects becoming more investment intensive, that is, more turbines, more cost, and more risk. This policy change effectively abolished village-owned wind projects while enriching mega-corporations like Vestas and Siemens.

As the size of the investment for wind power has grown over the period from the 1960s to now, the investment and returns have become more uncertain. This is because the Danish support system has changed from being based on giving investor/wind farms a fixed price per kilowatt-hour (kWh), the so-Called Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) fixed price system. During the 1990s, the FIT provided for a relatively lucrative investment for local wind farm land and other local residents (e.g., landowners/farmers). However, this changed, especially since the liberalization of the electricity market in 2001.

By 1999, market mechanisms had been introduced where the wind turbine is settled at a market price plus a fixed surcharge. This means that the return on investment is based on changing electricity prices, which introduces an uncertainty that, in most cases, can only be handled by major, commercial project developers with a portfolio of projects.

The Brief goes on to state:

In recent years, the development of land-based wind energy in Denmark has resulted in increased local resistance. In spite of political efforts to address this resistance, including different policies specifically aimed at letting locals see they could get something (economically) out of the development of a new local wind farm, this has not worked as intended. This indicates that a unilateral focus on financial compensation or other minor adjustments will often only serve as a short-term solution.

As a consequence of the technological and economic changes in the framework conditions and the abolition of residence duty, which in the first years had demanded that the developer be resident locally (‘dwelling duty’), the project developer type and ownership changed drastically during the period. From being dominated by smaller private owners who own the turbines, the windmill market in Denmark today is dominated by professional, commercial project developers, who often have no local presence in which they develop projects. This process has obviously taken place in line with the changed energy policy, in which the electricity sector was fully liberalized in 2003.

The Wind2050 results indicate that the professionalization and commercialization of the project developer and the liberalization of the wind energy market have meant that locals in Denmark increasingly feel that the wind industry has become less “popular” visually compared to the first years where it was more locally anchored and founded in an old Danish shareholding. At the same time, the Wind2050 results indicate that this development has resulted in increased local resistance.

The findings of the Wind2050 project should not surprise anyone as they closely parallel the views of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. But Denmark’s politicians, like their brethren in the U.S. and elsewhere, have been so blinded by the idea of wind power and its claimed economic rewards that they refuse to acknowledge the obvious environmental and human impacts.

Industry players are now trying to convince its boosters and themselves that by engaging communities early in the process and promising them a “piece of the action” opposition will quickly turn to support. The Wind2050 researchers found this is not the case, and we agree.  But we do suggest the CEOs of NextEra, Avangrid (Iberdrola), EDP Renewables, Apex, GE, Vestas, Siemens, etc. consider ‘dwelling duty’. Perhaps then we can have a conversation.

[1] The briefs are available in Danish only. Excerpts that appear in this essay were translated with the assistance of Google Translate.