Community Supported Wind Power
(Page 2 of 6)
June/July 2008
By Greg Pahl
The experience of community wind in Denmark and Germany is particularly instructive. Not only are the wind turbines, or clusters of turbines, distributed across the landscape, the ownership is spread across hundreds of thousands of individual participants. A quarter of the wind generating capacity in Denmark has been developed by windmill guilds (or vindmølleaug) roughly equivalent to what would be called cooperatives in North America. And in Germany, as much as one-third of the nation’s wind capacity has been built by associations of local landowners and residents, also known as Bürgerbeteiligung. Individual German investors have installed as much as 4,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity, an investment of over $4.8 billion. About 200,000 people in Germany own shares of a local wind turbine.
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There are numerous examples of successful community wind projects in Denmark, but perhaps the most famous Danish cooperative of all is Middelgrunden. Located on a shoal about 2 kilometers outside of Copenhagen Harbor, the Middelgrunden wind farm is comprised of 20 wind turbines. Ten of the turbines are owned by the Middelgrunden Wind Turbine Cooperative, while the remaining 10 are owned by Copenhagen Energy, the local municipal electric company. The relationship between the cooperative and the electric company proved to be helpful throughout the planning, approval and construction phases of the project. The wind farm provides enough electricity for more than 40,000 households in Copenhagen.
Wind Power Possibilities in North America
This model offers a lot of possibilities in North America, especially for communities that are trying to provide energy security in an era of increasingly uncertain supplies and higher prices. Yet there have been problems in transplanting this concept across the Atlantic Ocean.
“The potential for community wind is huge, but there are many obstacles in North America,” says wind guru Paul Gipe. “Utilities everywhere resist this, and virtually everything is stacked against you. The first problem is that you often can’t connect to the grid. Even if you can connect, you can’t get paid. And even if you can get paid, you can’t get paid enough. Other than that, there are the typical problems that you have with any development, such as financing, siting issues, zoning approvals and so on.”
Despite these many challenges, community wind has a lot going for it. Unlike traditional, large-scale power plants, wind energy is modular, meaning that each wind turbine is a self-contained power plant that can be sized and located with much more flexibility. Wind turbines can be grouped in large clusters or dispersed widely across the landscape.
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