History of Danish Wind Power - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 84

During the 1990s, wind turbines grew to MW-size. It meant that
the new growth in capacity could be ensured by fewer turbines.
But bigger wind turbines and absence of local ownership also
created more conflicts with neighbours around the sites, where
wind turbines were to be erected, disturbing some of the good-
will, the “green” renewable energy originally had. In some cases,
there were obvious reasons for the local protests, but they were
often heavily stimulated by outside lobbyists from the long battle
on “nuclear contra renewables” more than 10 years before.

3.19 Wind Power Goes Offshore

One of the solutions for the neighbour-problem was to place
wind turbines ofshore. This is because ofshore areas ofer plenty
of space with no neighbours to disturb. It was also possible to
find vast areas for wind parks with a large number of big turbines—
hard to find in a densely populated country like Denmark. It was
also an expensive solution, giving new challenges.
The first wind parks—some of them with more than 30
moderate-sized wind turbines (55-95 kW)—were erected in
1983-1986 by cooperatives, utilities, municipalities or private
investors. They were all land-based, though a municipality owned
park with 16 turbines at Ebeltoft installed in 1985 on a wave
braker connected to the shore, could claim to be “nearly ofshore”.
The first “true” ofshore wind park had eleven 450 kW Bonus
turbines and was placed 4 km from the north shore of the
island of Lolland in 1991. The next one came in 1995 and had ten
500 kW Vestas turbines, placed between Jutland and the island
Tunø. Both these wind parks were built by utilities.
With ambitious goals for ofshore capacity in the new energy
plans, the utilities were also expected to be important players
in this field. But even then, cooperatives were still driving forces
for the development. In 2000, an ofshore wind park—at that
time the world's largest—was built at Middelgrunden, close to
Copenhagen.

9

The long curved row of 20 wind ofshore turbines
became a spectacular sight for passengers arriving to or leaving
the Copenhagen Airport. Ten of the twenty 2 MW Bonus wind
turbines were owned by a cooperative with 8 650 members, the

9

About Middelgrunden, see chapter Cooperative Energy Movement in Copenhagen

by Jens Larsen.