From Energy Crisis to Industrial Adventure: A Chronicle - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 211

Figure 7.18 WEG wind turbines (Photo: Arne Jaeger).

In the case of all these big and very ambitious projects, it was
professionals from universities and big corporations, who designed
and developed the constructions, and led the work, followed by
great public attention, glossy publications and presentations at
international conferences.
In the initial phase, the experience gained from the big test
wind turbine was generally so depressing, the technology so
complicated and costly, that wind power would hardly have been
a relevant option today, if not for the Danish parallel development
from below, starting with windmills of 20 kW, not 2 000 kW, made
by independent enterprises and available without exclusivity to all
potential manufacturers.
In the 1980s, German pioneer enterprises such as Enercon
and Tacke or Spanish Ecotecnica got the idea of using components
from the Danish supply chain. Without it, perhaps these countries
would hardly have had their sturdy wind power industry, which
in the 1990s became the only real competitor to Denmark.
In the end of the 1980s, it was difficult to estimate the
technological influence of these costly public development projects
on the contemporary commercial windmill industry with its
small machines of 30 to 200 kW. The research projects, however,