Company’s extreme wind strategy: Towns today, turbines tomorrow
Credit: by Philip Tees | The Copenhagen Post | January 16, 2015 | cphpost.dk ~~
Swedish energy company Vattenfall is going to extreme lengths for the sake of its Danish windfarms – buying up whole villages in rural Denmark, razing them to the ground and replacing the buildings with wind turbines, Børsen reports.
Mette Korsager, who is responsible for Vattenfall’s onshore wind projects in Denmark, told the business newspaper that the strategy was to make it easier for the company to achieve the goal of installing 250 MW of wind turbines in Denmark by 2018-2019. “We typically buy up farms in bad condition and demolish the farmhouse,” she said.
“Recently we bought most of a village to make a windpark.”
Helps the region, according to Vattenfall
That village is Kølby in northern Jutland, and Vattenfall plans to acquire a total of 20 properties.
Korsager told Børsen the strategy served a number of purposes. “We solve the problem of unsellable properties in peripheral regions,” she said.
“We solve the problem of neighbours being critical of wind farms, and we make it easier to reach agreements about the installation of wind turbines at the municipalities because we go in and help them by developing problem areas.”
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ECWd comments: I guess Pilot Township, and rural Rossville/Hoopeston are the “Problem Areas” of Vermilion County…..that must be it.
“Solving the problem of unsellable properties…” – If that is not a clear admission that there are severe problems with wind farms being located too close to a residence, I don’t know what is.
3 Comments
Richard Mann
Posted at 21:01h, 19 JanuaryNews from Ontario Canada.
The irony of this is that Ontario for all its money spent on subsidies for renewable energy, is not even reducing C02 emissions. We have been sold a bill of goods by our government, and by the environmental movement in general. Neither wants to admit that this scheme has been a huge failure.
OSPE (Ontario Society of Professional Engineers) have written a number of reports that show the difficulty integrating intermittent wind energy into the electrical grid. For details look at the document “Engineering Expertise Vital to Success of Ontario’s Electricity System: OSPE”, Jan 16, 2013.
Engineers’ reports are significant because they are legally bound to report success (or failure) of their projects. Reading the reports you’ll see what we have suspected all along. Engineers must follow government mandate (move to Green energy), but they cannot show a reduction in C02.
Henrik Nielsen
Posted at 08:02h, 19 January@ECWd: “If that is not a clear admission that there are severe problems with wind farms being located too close to a residence, I don’t know what is.”
You have misunderstood this or jumped to the conclusion you prefer to draw. The reason these (and many other) properties in the Danish countryside are unsellable is urbanisation. People move to Copenhagen or a few of the larger provincial towns, which leads to decreasing demand for houses in the countryside. There are now many villages with empty houses and just a few elderly inhabitants, especially in the south of Denmark. What Vattenfall is doing in fact makes good sense.
jmkraft
Posted at 09:05h, 19 JanuaryIf you are the same person that works for Vestas, then I will simply say that you are entitled to your opinion.
I am not familiar with the Danish countryside, but people do not typically abandon their homes and towns because of “urbanization”, at least not in the U.S.
Judging from the satellite photo, it does not appear that you have described the actual conditions (empty houses – elderly inhabitants) of the town of Kølby (the town the article talks about): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Guldsmed+Hanne+Behrens/@56.9791313,9.4216568,911m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x46493e2f2ee653ef:0xd7c2d4e6d50e432b