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by electric utility company SEAS, was occupied for some time by
prospecting local peat sources for securing the electricity supply
south of Copenhagen. Being an early student at the wind courses of
Paul la Cour, Johannes Juul began wondering, whether it would be
possible to improve the situation by building wind turbines for
electricity production. SEAS allowed him to build several prototypes.
The last prototype was inaugurated in 1957 at Gedser. This 200 kW
turbine was operating successfully until its decommissioning in
1967, only 6 years before the first “oil crisis” in 1973. Just 10 years
after the last turn of the Gedser turbine's rotor, its design became
the blueprint for the first commercially produced wind turbines
in Denmark.
8.1
Nuclear Power—No Thanks!
I was born in 1949 and raised on a farm with cows, pigs, hens
and ducks. My grandfather was a Christian missionary in Nigeria.
Thus fighting for an idea was nothing new to me. In the wake
of the oil crisis, electric utilities as well as the Danish political
establishment in Copenhagen in 1974 insisted on the rapid
development of nuclear power reactors in Denmark, in order to
secure a stable delivery of electricity to the Danish industry. We
did not agree on that idea, and we wanted to work for alternatives
to nuclear power.
As a teenager, I was a nerd designing and building rubber
powered model airplanes. While studying to become an engineer in
Copenhagen, I was a member of the Polytechnic Glider Club, flying
gliders. In 1973 I dropped out of engineering studies and moved to
western Denmark with my would-be wife. We bought a small farm
and I started developing a solar powered water heating system,
which I intended to manufacture. We wanted to create new products
for a greener planet, and we never asked if our goals were realistic.
In 1976 I made my first wind turbine blades for a 600 W turbine
for a “Friends of the Earth” summer camp. The blades were 1.7 m
long, made of fibreglass, and very primitive.
In the years after the 1968-youth revolution, the general
anti-authoritarian spirit between young people helped the new
anti-nuclear power organisation, OOA, to attract supporters and
activists. OOA was known for the “smiling sun” badge. In 1975 OOA
gave birth to a new organisation for renewable energy called OVE.
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