by Paul Gipe
Copyright 2001 by Paul Gipe. All rights reserved. This essay may not be copied or circulated without express permission.
. . . Through this program nearly any Danish household can effectively generate all its own electricity with wind energy. It worked, and the concept has also caught on in Germany and the Netherlands.
Danish law encourages cooperative purchase of wind turbines by exempting them from taxes on the portion of the wind generation that goes to offset a household's domestic electricity consumption. Cooperatives buy a wind turbine, site it to greatest advantage, sell the electricity to the utility, and share the revenues. This enables a group to buy the most cost-effective turbine available, even though it may generate more electricity than any individual home may need.
. . . Until recent utility restructuring, cooperatives were paid 85% of the retail price of electricity for their generation. They also received payment for the carbon dioxide tax, and a portion of the electricity tax paid by all consumers on domestic consumption.
. . . Danish wind coops vary in size from a single turbine to small wind farms. Turbines today are so big that they can produce more than one million kWh per year, requiring more than 100 members per machine.
The 2,100 wind cooperatives in Denmark accounted for about 50% of the nation's total installed wind power in the mid 1990s. Some 100,000 Danish households, or nearly 5%, of the population own a stake in a fællesm¢lle, or cooperatively-owned wind turbine.