Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 4
Wind Power in Denmark
4.1 INTRODUCTION
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
—James Baldwin, from
Notes of a Native Son
In technological policy literature, the term “path dependency” frequently
emerges in attempts to explain why a given technological track develops.
he premise behind the notion of technological path dependency is that his-
torical social, technological, economic, and political forces foster conditions
for a particular technology to thrive. Once a technology becomes dominant,
vested interests—which proit from the technology—hinder radical change,
because change carries an implicit threat that those beneitting from the
status quo might sufer an erosion of economic beneits.
To illustrate path dependency, consider the history of the QWERTY key-
board (referring to the sequencing of letters from left to right on the top
row of a standard computer keyboard).
1
Keyboards on typewriters were
designed in this way to reduce mechanical type hammers from clashing with
each other. Over time, type hammers were made obsolete by type-balls.
Nevertheless, the QWERTY keyboard remained unchanged (even in this
day of computerized word processing)—despite the fact that research has
shown the QWERTY layout to be inferior in terms of optimizing typing
speed. his layout has perpetuated because legions of typists have learned
on the QWERTY keyboard; therefore, technological familiarity has insu-
lated this design feature from change.
he notion of path dependency is relevant to the story of wind power
development in Denmark because, as will be described in this chapter, a
number of social, economic, technological, and political forces shepherded
