Networks of Wind Energy Enthusiasts and the Development of the “Danish Concept” - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 116

and entrepreneurs to the politicians, industry and utility
companies. Even among the proponents and the “new” wind
industry activists, there were competing interests concerning the
direction of technology development and the associated political
implications of those directions. Grassroots and counter-culture
enthusiasts saw the development and adoption of small-scale
wind turbines as a way of promoting their agenda of energy
independence from large centrally controlled utility systems. On
the other hand, political support for the technology was realised
on a grander scale via industrial giants and associated

scientific communities the advance of large-scale wind

turbines that could be co-located to create electricity generation
facilities on the same scale in size as contemporary power plants.
While the technological developments of such eforts were not
mutually exclusive, they were sufficiently dissimilar to create
a divide between the two groups. Rhetoric from both sides
sought to undermine the initiatives of the other. Large-wind
proponents made knowledge claims that small-wind could not
achieve the performance needed for wind to be a significant
contributor to various countries' energy independence. Small-wind
proponents attacked large-wind programs as being overrun by
hubris and wasting both monetary and human capital.
Several decades have passed and various accounts have
now been written about both the large-scale federal and small-
scale entrepreneurial wind development eforts from the 1970s to
today. Such accounts have almost universally determined that the
small-scale, predominantly Danish, wind energy entrepreneurs
provided a superior avenue for innovation and proliferation of
the technology to that provided by large-scale industrial eforts
which were largely funded by federal government programs in the
United States and elsewhere.

via

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Such claims highlight that the big

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The development of WECs—modern wind turbines—have been treated
with many analytical lenses—some popular accounts (Gipe, 1995; Maegaard
2009a), some interpretations by political theory (Van Est, 1999), several within
the vein of innovation theory (Garud and Karnoe, 2003; Christensen, 2009),
and still others within the field of history of technology (Heymann, 1995;
Heymann, 1998; Serchuk, 1996). These latter accounts from the history of
technology tradition focus on the implications of diferent social and cultural
contexts on the development of the technology. The work of Matthias Heymann
is a comprehensive work looking at the cross-country development of the
technology with emphasis on federal programs in Germany, the United States