WINDPOWER
The Dutch long ago abandoned their trademark windmills, wooden
shoes, and the “milk maid” look in women’s fashions. Clogs may never
return, but in recent years wind power has been making a remarkable
comeback. Huge, high-tech wind turbines spin in a long row mounted
atop the great dike separating the “New Land” province of Flevoland
from the waters of what was once the Zuider Sea. In 2002 alone, the
Netherlands added 217 megawatts of new wind generators, increasing
overall capacity by nearly a third, as part of its effort to meet Kyoto
emissions targets.
Most of those turbines come from nearby Denmark, where the
Vestas and NEC-Micon companies dominate the world’s wind energy
industry, which quadrupled its capacity between 1997 and 2002. These
two Danish manufacturers supplied more than half the turbines now
in use worldwide, which now represent one of the country’s largest
exports. In Denmark, wind turbines dot the countryside like gigantic
pinwheels, while huge offshore wind stations harness the stiff winds
from the Baltic and North Seas. The Middelgrunden Wind Farm just
offshore from Copenhagen is the world’s largest offshore wind plant,
its twenty machines generating enough power to supply 32,000 house-
holds. In 2003, Denmark’s wind turbines generated more than 15 per-
cent of Denmark’s electricity supply, and the government planned to
increase that figure to 50 percent by 2030. Danish turbines have been
exported to Germany and Spain, each of which has more wind-gener-
ating capacity than the United States. (The Germans have 12,000
megawatts of wind turbines, nearly four times the U.S. total.) “I don’t
think we can save the world with wind energy,” says Christian Kjaer of
the Danish Wind Manufacturer’s Association in Copenhagen. “But we
can show the world that being environmentally conscious doesn’t have
to come at the expense of economic growth.”
Indeed, while much of the rest of the world has been talking about
reducing greenhouse emissions, Denmark has actually been doing it.
Authorities in central Copenhagen have deployed two thousand bicy-
cles in public squares and train stations that can be borrowed for free,
while a nationwide tax on automobile purchases more than triples the
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