Fighting windmills? EU industrial interests and global climate negotiations

Table 6 shows the offshore wind farms in operation at the end of 2000. In total,
86 MW of offshore wind capacity is installed in the seas of Northern Europe.
The biggest wind farm at the moment is ”Middelgrunden” in Denmark with its
20 2MW wind turbines (close to the Copenhagen harbour). There are several
reasons to believe that the off-shore wind industry is likely to boom in the near
future. For example, the German government has recently announced an ambi-
tious plan to boost wind power’s share of electricity consumption to ”at least 25
per cent by 2025”. The lion’s share of this will come from a 20-25,000 MW
offshore wind capacity in the North and Baltic Seas. ”Within a generation (...)
one fourth of our current electricity needs will be generated with environmen-
tally-friendly wind power”, says Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin (EWEA,
2002b).

Table 6: Offshore wind farms

Source: EWEA (2002a). Reprinted by permission from the European Wind Energy
Association (EWEA).

When the off-shore industry starts to reap economies of scale and learning-by-
doing effects, the costs of wind power will probably fall dramatically, as we
have seen onshore (EWEA, 2002a; Svendsen 2003).¹³ Off-shore wind experts

13 In Madsen et all. (2002) the relationship between size of a windmill and the costs/kW is esti-
mated and it is clearly negative (as indicated in Table 6). Off shore wind turbines are expected

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