Fighting windmills? EU industrial interests and global climate negotiations

Figure 4: Position of technologies on the learning curve¹⁰

Costs

However, as we will discus further in section 5, new types of windmills that are
offshore may even reduce the costs of windmill production further, and have
the potential to make windmill based energy production competitive even in
case where reductions of emissions are not done efficiently. But first, let us now
turn to the empirical side, to get a more precise picture of the dominant position
of the European windmill industry, and how the markets for wind energy have
evolved.

3. Why the EU has been more energy restrictive than
the US?

The development of more energy efficient technologies in the EU could be due
to three main reasons. First, the EU had huge imports of oil in the 1960s and
1970s whereas the United States was self-supplying. The EU dependency on oil

10 Mature technologies in widespread use have lower costs with lower variance; the costs of radi-
cal new technologies are higher and more variable. Variability of costs is also an indicator of
the uncertainty of technology costs. Radical technologies are little tried.

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