The Danes have been world leaders in wind energy, but it has not always been plain sailing
IT IS now nearly 30 years since the late George Colley, then minister for energy, stood on the west coast of Jutland looking at Denmark’s first two experimental wind turbines. Although he and his officials were impressed, they came home and did nothing – while the Danes went on to become world leaders in wind power technology.
Now, with Copenhagen hosting the crucial UN climate change summit in December, they’re keen to blow their own trumpet about what has been achieved by this relatively small EU member state. And so, we found ourselves back in Jutland after all these years, on a “power trip” press tour organised by Climate Consortium Denmark.
Over 5,500 wind turbines are now operating in Denmark, supplying more than 20 per cent of the country’s electricity demand. They include vast offshore installations like Horns Rev, up to 20km off the west coast of Jutland, where 80 huge turbines – with a 70m hub height – generate 160 megawatts (mw) of power at full production. Plans are being made for a much larger (4,600mw) offshore wind power project in the Baltic Sea that would link Danish, Swedish and German “wind parks” in an international electricity grid.
This project, Kriegers Flak, is estimated to cost €1.3 billion, partly funded by EU aid from the European Commission’s renewable energy budget. During a storm in 2005, wind power met 100 per cent of Denmark’s electricity demand, though it had to be shut down when wind speeds exceeded 25m a second, according to Lars Aagaard, managing director of the Danish Energy Association. When that happened, hydro power from Norway flowed in to keep the country supplied.
Energinet.dk, which runs Denmark’s national grid, exports cheap wind-generated electricity to both Norway and Sweden when the wind is blowing and imports more expensive hydro or nuclear-generated power when it’s not. The grid also has to be reorganised so that wind is “first in line”, meaning that other power sources are secondary. Peder Andreasen, Energinet.dk’s chief executive, told us about the “huge challenge” of integrating wind into a grid that was dominated by 16 fossil fuel generating stations. But external links are so strong that up to two-thirds of the country’s electricity can be exported or imported at the flick of a switch in its new control centre outside Fredericia.
Denmark aims to generate 30 per cent of the energy it needs from renewable sources by 2020 – a third more than the EU target. Lars Aagaard expects that most of this will come from wind and that more and more wind farms will be built offshore, mainly because public acceptance by Danes of onshore developments has “dissipated”. The world’s first profitable offshore installation is the Middelgrunden wind park, an arc of 20 Siemens 2mw turbines that can be seen from planes approaching Kastrup airport.
Owned and operated by Dong Energy – part of the consortium awarded the Poolbeg incinerator contract in Dublin – it’s located 300m from Copenhagen harbour. Horns Rev, off Jutland, was the world’s most ambitious offshore wind park when it was being planned in the late 1990s by Vestas, Denmark’s market leader. But it turned into a very expensive learning curve for the company; all of the equipment – gearboxes, generators, and so on – had to be replaced in 2004 because the winds were so strong.
Chief executive Ditlev Engel told us that Vestas had “totally underestimated the challenge of one of most aggressive wind regimes” in the world – the North Sea – but had “learned a lot” from the experience, which cost the company €38 million. One of the continuing challenges is that when waves are high, Horns Rev can only be serviced by helicopter. Angel was speaking at Vestas’ new research and development centre near Aarhus, where engineers electronically monitor the performance of 15,000 wind turbines worldwide, diagnosing any problems as they arise.
The company, which employs 20,000 people in Denmark and overseas, has produced more than 38,000 turbines in 25 years. We went to see Horns Rev on a sailing ship, the Havet, which was built entirely of wood in 1954 and is now run by Alice and Henning Breindahl, who are proud to call it their home. Up close, the wind turbines were enormous; over half were operating at full tilt while others were being serviced from a boat that was dwarfed by them.
Meanwhile, Vestas is closing down its factory on the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel, because it doesn’t see Britain as a growth area in the short to medium term, and is simultaneously building two factories in Colorado to position itself for an anticipated renewable energy boom in the US, aided by Barack Obama’s multi-billion dollar stimulus package. This package, which includes $70 billion in clean energy investments and another $20 billion in tax incentives for renewables, “will kickstart the industry in the United States”, according to Ditlev Engel.
Having cut its profit forecast for 2009 and laid off 1,300 employees, Vestas needs the business – and is moving forward aggressively to capture it. Engel sees big wind parks as the way to go, backed up by “smart” transmission grids capable of dealing with fluctuations. “Smart grids give completely new opportunities for wind, eliminating instability,” he says, citing a recent MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) report suggesting that it could generate up to 80 per cent of Europe’s electricity “if we had the right grid”.
As oil becomes more expensive, generating an energy crisis that “will fast succeed the financial crisis”, Engel says wind will become much more competitive – not least because it is free, uses no water and doesn’t emit a single gramme of carbon dioxide. And Denmark has provided the world with a road map showing how it can be developed.
