An Assessment of Danish wind power: The real state-of-play and its hidden costs

As mentioned above, the Danish wind industry is a strong export industry, and this makes a direct comparison with Obama’s plan difficult with regard to actual job creation in the wind industry. It seems highly unlikely that large country’s wind industry such as the US – having a population of more than 50 times the population of Denmark – would be able to replicate the Danish share of exports of wind turbine technology. In that way a US expansion is expected to be predominantly domestic, and at the same time the industry is probably going to face foreign competition from companies such as Vestas, Siemens and new low cost producers in countries like India.

Based on the Danish experiences with wind power, subsidies to wind need to be significant or corresponding taxes on carbon-based electricity need to be increased substantially. The Danish experience also suggests that a strong US wind expansion would not benefit the overall economy. It would entail substantial costs to the consumer and industry, and only to a lesser degree benefit a small part of the economy, namely wind turbine owners, wind shareholders and those employed in the sector.

Windenergy-thecaseofDenmarkfinal11-09-09.pdf