Danish Pioneering of Modern Wind Power - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 172

it was finally decided to establish the Danish Steering Committee
for RES with me as the chairman.
In the Danish tradition the members of such committees are
usually selected according to a politically balanced combination
of representatives from labour unions, industrial organisations,
ministries, universities and professional organisations involved in
the subject in question. This is a guarantee that no new and original
schemes are proposed—disturbing the political decision makers.
As a consequence, I insisted that the Steering Committee should
be diferent and that all members should be experts in the field
of RES and be enthusiastic about a sustainable future with RES as
an important factor. To my surprise this was accepted.
The annual budget of the Steering Committee started at EUR
2.7 million in 1983 and was gradually increased to EUR 4 million in
1990. In this period there was a “green majority” in the parliament
and this majority was a guaranty for our budget. The total govern-
mental subsidy to the Steering Committee over the nine years of
operation from 1982 to 1991 amounted to about EUR 30 million.
The Steering Committee became an important factor for
the development of Danish RES. Its goal was to support the
development of RES production in small- and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs), and to promote technological development,
demonstration projects and information projects concerning RES.
The Steering Committee was diferent from the usual political
correct committees due to its open and loud-speaking discussions
of strategies and technological questions. The fact is, however,
that we nearly always reached a constructive consensus that
could accelerate the penetration of RES in Denmark. Our support
covered a broad spectrum of RES activities including biogas, solar
heating, wind power and local and regional demonstrations of
systems based on RES (Beuse , 2000), for example, a project

describing how the Danish island Bornholm could be transformed
to a “green island” including some wind parks (Jørgensen

et al.

et al. ,

1986). This project was partly implemented.
In the same period from 1983 on, the Folkecenter for Renewable
Energy (FCRE) in northern Jutland (Thy) in a constructive way
supplemented the work of the Steering Committee by practical
demonstration of wind turbine technologies combined with
construction manuals for SMEs that wanted to produce wind
turbines. FCRE was initiated by Preben Maegaard in 1983, and