ABSTRACT
The development of wind power is a fascinating story that tells us a lot about how really significant change often comes about from the actions of unsung, unknown entrepreneurs with a clear vision of the future, but operating beneath the radar of the mainstream culture, and how politicians are often the last to understand the long term consequences of their actions or, unfortunately, their lack of action. If you were to ask an American politician today if society ought to be investing far greater sums in renewable energy, many would shake their heads and mumble something about “prophets of doom” or “idealists out of touch with reality”. Those that respond positively will offer as their main argument that we must reduce
our dependence on unstable Middle-East sources of oil, their main concern being to continue their current lifestyles with as few disturbances as possible. Only a few would mention anything about ecological overload, climate change, peak oil, sustainability or the needs of future generations. And yet it is the latter factors that are really critical to understanding the urgent need for more renewable energy. Interestingly, these are precisely the kinds of argument you will hear from those who actually started the wind power adventure. They had an intuitive understanding of the need for clean energy if our civilisation is to survive and thrive-people like my good friend Preben Maegaard, who made the vision of a sustainable future the driving force in his life’s work as far back as 1970. Today, if you could make a search engine to seek out the greatest concentration of windmills in the world, it would lead you to Preben at his Nordic Folkecenter for Renewable Energy in northwest Denmark. Let us now look at the arguments for increased investment in renewables, and particularly in wind power. 1.1 Ecological OverloadA useful quantitative measure of the degree of sustainability of a region is the so-called “ecological footprint”. While it is a rough measure, it is the most useful tool we have at this time for the impact of human societies on the environment. The ecological footprint measures the amount of land that would be required by the population of a region in order to provide the renewable resources consumed and the sinks to absorb waste products. This measure is now widely used. Data are published regularly by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) for 150 nations in their Living Planet Report [1]. In the period 1961-2008, the total footprint increased from approximately 53% to 150%, as shown in Fig. 1.1. The 2008 level thus corresponded to an overshoot of roughly 50%. The overshoot is probably closer to 60% in 2013. WWF figures are about three years behind for data collection reasons, but our footprint is thought to be growing by 2% per year.
