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cooperatives during the ledgling years of the wind power development
program were structured as tax incentives; therefore, the iscal impact was
deferred, to be theoretically ofset by proits associated with the investment.
he feed-in tarifs (or price premiums) were inanced mostly by passing the
cost through to end-consumers, which explains in part why electricity consum-
ers in Denmark have historically paid such high prices for electricity. Even grid
reinforcement was a cost that the government forced onto the utilities.
4.7 THE CULMINATION OF INFLUENCES
All of the STEP forces discussed in this chapter have interacted in a man-
ner that has produced a policy soup that exhibits a unique lavor which no
other nation shares. It is for this reason that investigating Denmark's wind
power support policies in isolation of the aforementioned social, technolog-
ical, economic, and political inluences would likely yield suboptimal results
when trying to determine which of Denmark's policies are transferrable to
other national contexts. A brief review of how wind power development
policy has evolved to Denmark illustrates the ineluctable inluence of STEP
elements.
If it weren't for social opposition to nuclear power back in the early
1980s, it may very well be that today's scholars might be critically evalu-
ating the rise of Denmark's thriving nuclear power program. It was only
through well-organized social opposition that political support for nuclear
power was derailed, opening a window of opportunity for wind power tech-
nology development.
If Denmark's agricultural manufacturing sector was not the irst to
exhibit commercial interest in wind power development, the domestic evo-
lution of wind turbine manufacturing may have centered around the chal-
lenge of developing large-scale, high-tech turbines, as has been the model
in many other European nations. In such a case Danish irms may not have
been able to establish the quality reputation that allowed them to proit
from California's wind power boom. Moreover, if a national culture did not
exist in Denmark wherein academia, government, and industry were com-
fortable with collaborative R&D, wind power manufacturing initiatives may
have become too fragmented to compete on an international scale.
To the contrary, Denmark's agricultural irms
were
interested in produc-
ing wind turbines and they
were
able to leverage centralized support for
R&D, thanks to a government that recognized that an opportunity existed
for nurturing a wind power manufacturing industry.
127
Arguably, without
centralized research (incorporating government bodies, academia, and
