Hi, Brian.
That was a hard one to research, but I found some figures. The 1996 government energy plan wanted to have 10% of electricity production to come from windmills in year 2005, and 30% in 2030. This was already reached in 1999, which made the government change the goal. Now, 20% of the electricity production in 2003 must come from renewable sources, which means both windmill energy and biogas. The biggest share of the 20% will still be windmills.
In year 2000, 13% of electricity production was made by windmills, and for year 2001, it will be 16%. In other words, the numbers you heard are correct. The numbers is the percentage of energy production for all purposes, including industry etc.
Some other figures, that might be interesting to you, is that 10,7% of all energy consumption, including fuel for warming houses and gas for vehicles, is made by renewable energy.
Windmills is modern technology today, totally computerized and TCP/IP networked. 20 mills outside the Copenhagen harbour have just been set up, and those 20 mills will contribute with 3% of the total electricity needed for Copenhagen, a city with approx. 1.5 million people. You can see pictures of the windmill parks in the Wind_Power99.pdf file linked below, on page 9-13. Windmills are typically placed offshore, and typically near harbours or industry. Farmers often also set up a windmill or two away from towns - they are noisy, and nobody likes to live near a windmill.
In fact, I don't know anywhere within 20km range, where I could find a windmill.
Links:
ens.dk
ens.dk
ens.dk
By the way: We don't have wooden windmills in Denmark outside museums - you must be thinking of Holland/Netherlands, where you can still see such mills around.
Downsides: You don't control the wind. Our plans to increase wind power production will give us excessive power productions during winter, which is a main reason why we have initiated talks with Sweden, that has a lot of water power, which produces most power during the summer. More power cables will link Sweden and Denmark in the future, in order to produce energy most wisely.
There is no doubt that Oil prices will increase a lot in a few decades, within the lifetime of a new power plant, and that coal isn't the solution to all our problems. Nuclear power somehow doesn't solve it all, and fusion reactors will not be there until after oil has gotten expensive.
Lars. |
