Policy, not tech, spurred Danish dominance in wind energy | Hacker News Reader

Policy, not tech, spurred Danish dominance in wind energy

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129 pointsrustoo77 comments

The important idea here IMO is that "free markets" don't exist and don't drive anything. States create policies (Ideally, these policies would be entirely democratically chosen, alas that's rarely how it works). Markets appear. No market can make any meaningful decision on what to do and where to go at any time out of day to day operation.

Unfortunately the EU commission (and most of our governments) seem to believe that "let the magic invisible hand of the market work, and all will be great". Not.

On another note, it's fascinating to see that about 80-85% of our energy in Europe is from fossil fuels. A very large (and rapidly increasing) part of these fossil fuels are imported (because North sea is in rapid decline), often from quite unpleasant countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc). But apparently noone in power seem genuinely interested in sorting out this big problem in a way that would be advantageous to the European public (not even mentioning the climate). Some actively behave like foreign agents, in fact. Go figure.

> apparently noone in power seem genuinely interested in sorting out this big problem in a way that would be advantageous to the European public

I disagree. Europeans have effortfully elected for policy that moves the problem. Merkel shutting down Germany’s nuclear fleet, for example, remains popular [1].

Switching energy sources is costly. I have seen zero evidence of Europe being unusually willing to bear that cost.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/polls-reveal-citi... See “Survey by the Renewable Energy Hamburg Cluster”

> Merkel shutting down Germany’s nuclear fleet, for example, remains popular [1].

Alas, I know. But in that case that really was a terrible decision because the public has been thoroughly misinformed for 40 years (I'm a staunch nuclear advocate).

> the public has been thoroughly misinformed for 40 years

I agree. Voters in Germany and West Virginia aren’t evil. They are responding to near-term incentives with the information they have.

But the effect is clear. They vote for policies that appear virtuous but minimise impacts to their way of life.

It doesn't minimise the impact: coal mining and burning kills several thousand Germans every year, alas. It's the usual safety bias, like being afraid of flying but driving fast on the motorway.

Also, an often-forgotten historical fact is that the Dutch Golden Age –

(circa 1600-1700, highest per capita income of the world, 60% urbanization)

– was also (mostly?) powered by a fossil fuel : peat. (Which drowned their country in the process of digging it.)

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/peat-and-coal-fossil...

That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. Energy can explain so much about human endeavours in so few words.

I've read quite a lot of history, but Richard Rhodes' book Energy, A Human History, gave me a perspective unlike any other.

Who would have thought that the laws of thermodynamics would be so important a mechanism for social science? Well, I suppose physicists might, but social scientists usually not.

Well, after all societies are also dissipative structures...

http://www.francois-roddier.fr/blog_en/?p=29

That was a very interesting article. The seperate thermal and kinetic energy usage in medieval times was something I hadn't thought about.

Free markets are people voluntarily interacting and have driven almost all technological development throughout history. At the frontier, sometimes the government spends money on things where the risk is too high or the payoff too small in short term.

But look at all the innovation around you - how much of that is directly government funded/directed?

> Free markets are people voluntarily interacting and have driven almost all technological development

Free markets drive the scale and lower the price of technologies discovered by speculative public investment.

> At the frontier, sometimes the government spends money on things where the risk is too high or the payoff too small in short term.

And that is where most technological development takes place: at the frontier. And well behind the frontier, the government must also spend on the education of its populace so that they can actually implement the ideas revealed by the frontier, whether that means primary through education or technician type skills, which feeds into the free market pipeline to drive scale and lower costs.

Broad access to educational opportunity is something that European countries do very well: assuring that their population (AKA pool of labor) is skilled enough to implement technologies like solar and wind.

"people voluntarily interacting"

A referendum falls under that description too.

"how much of that is directly government funded/directed"

Basically all fundamental research is government funded, from space exploration to study of the atom. Then publically funded scientists have published reseach papers, after the scientific journals earned their money without giving a dime to original authors.

Then you might have entrepreneurs pick up these concepts and exploit them, and even then many technologies, like GPS, still have to be done by the state.

Just because 50% agree on something doesn't mean it's voluntary. If you vote and everyone volunteers to do it that's fine, if you have to point a gun at them and threaten them with jail - then it's not voluntary.

Yes, many large scale innovations happen due to government funding - I explicitly called that out. I'm saying that there are tons more innovations than just those. The trick for innovation is at scale is getting it to the commercial market. There's a reason the government prefers commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) vs custom tech.

Also science != innovation, and it's not necessarily science->innovation. Many times it's innovation->science.

The idea that 'free markets' are entirely voluntary is a complete fantasy - tell me, when mobile operators were selling everyone's location, how many people volunteered for that? [1]

And what are they meant to do about it in a 'free market' where there is literally no other option? I consent to having a mobile phone in the same way I consent to living in a country - the alternative is living like a caveman in the woods.

How do free markets, without anyone being threatened with jailtime, deal with monopolies and market manipulation - say all cable / internet providers just blocking Netflix, or Apple/Google making a secret agreement on wage suppressions [2]

And if you agree that free markets need regulation, and that regulation greatly affects who becomes winners and losers, then you are back where you started -> how many people have agreed to that.

1 - https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel... 2 - https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

"Also science != innovation, and it's not necessarily science->innovation. Many times it's innovation->science."

Could you give an example? To me this sounds logically impossible - one has to understand the scientific principles before you can innovate on them.

Lenses and mirror construction led the field of optics. Which then opened up microscopes and telelcoses, etc.

Here's a paper that addresses the simple model (science->tech): https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/file...

Another example would be bridge and building construction were around long before the we understood physics. In fact, through experimentation we gather examples and try to understand how to build better arches, etc and eventually learn to understand why what works.

> Could you give an example? To me this sounds logically impossible - one has to understand the scientific principles before you can innovate on them.

Steam engine --> thermodynamics

> "people voluntarily interacting" A referendum falls under that description too

So if half the country votes to levy extra taxes on people of a certain race for example, that is "voluntary"?

Almost all of it. Rockets, computers, internet, almost everything of any significance has been bootstrapped by governments. Particularly in the US, government spending has been the root of all innovation since forever. The legend of SV garages startup is just that, a legend. The Valley started up thanks to a huge influx of government (mostly military) money around WWII. See the very interesting "secret history of Silicon Valley", digest here: https://unherd.com/2019/04/the-secret-history-of-silicon-val...

I completely agree - many early technologies are bootstrapped / funded by the government. There is no argument there, but once the initial prototype is complete - it is almost always better for progress for it to move toward commercialization and that is where rapid innovation takes place.

> it is almost always better for progress for it to move toward commercialization and that is where rapid innovation takes place.

In what context? A capitalist society that's not at war, with limited crime/corruption, with established trade routes where most people are literate and a banking system that's willing to give out loans?

If in that specific context, then probably yes. Do you see how that is an extremely narrow set of circumstances that's subject to change?

This idea of government = less efficient, markets = efficient, is paid for propaganda by American billionaires that's been well documented. I forget the name of the book that goes through this in detail.

It is not to say government = more efficient, markets = less efficient. The world is not that simple and anyone trying to make it out to be, is selling you an ideology that benefits them - check to see if it benefits you to believe in ideas that have insufficient empirical evidence to justify them.

This really overstates the case. Government-funded R&D programs only really kicked off after the Manhattan Project. There was a lot of innovation before that, like the entirety of the industrial revolution.

Indeed many great innovations, like "have the Pinkertons shoot anyone that tries to strike".

That's overstating it a bit. The first liquid fueled rocket for example, was created entirely privately by Robert Goddard. And regarding SV, the Route 128 area received even more government investment. The book Regional Advantage delves into this.

> to see that about 80-85% of our energy in Europe is from fossil fuels

Only if you mean total energy and not only electricity

> In the EU in 2018, 40 % of the electricity consumed came from power stations burning fossil fuels and 33 % from renewable energy sources, while 26 % came from nuclear power plants. Among the renewable energy sources, the highest share of electricity consumed came from wind turbines (11 %), hydropower plants (13 %), biofuels (5 %) and solar power (4 %).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-3...

Of course I mean all energy. I don't understand why everyone think only of electricity. Globalisation relies on transports, and transports rely at more than 90% on oil. Oil is the blood of our global world, and there's no credible alternative in sight (the peak, OTOH, is well in sight and could even be behind us already).

Alternatives were around for at least 40 years - all large ships could be nuclear powered, and everything that can't run on batteries could run on synthetic methane, biofuel or hydrogen.

And perhaps transport is too cheap, how does it make sence that a pair of jeans travels the world 3 times before it lands on the shelf, or that fish is caught in scotland, de-boned in malasia and sold in US.

Perhaps what we call globalisation is a poorly designed, tax-evading, fragile, energy-wasting system.

> Perhaps what we call globalisation is a poorly designed, tax-evading, fragile, energy-wasting system.

Oh boy yes indeed.

It takes almost as much energy to transport your food by car from the supermarket as it takes to ship it by cargo ship.

Also: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

This is great, very informative.

I was grinding my axe against the transport that exploits cheaper workforce elaewhere, rather than georgraphy/resources that might actually reduce emissions.

My description of the free market fantasy is buying a house with a nice natural looking garden Then thinking it got that way by itself. And then being confused a few years later that your back yard is all weeds and bermuda grass.

That said story from the early nineties. Some friends that worked at an engine diagnostic tools company. Talking how bad Hyundai cars were. I told them I thought Hyundai would eventually become a reliable brand. Because they and South Korea were all in. I've seen that again and again a willingness to commit to see something through overcomes a lot of negatives.

What that says to me that economists idea of comparative advantage really about that, not about much else.

> No market can make any meaningful decision on what to do and where to go at any time out of day to day operation.

> Unfortunately the EU commission (and most of our governments) seem to believe

Maybe because people in EU commission are not that arrogant and ignorant to ignore the resource allocation problem and need for markets?

While subsidies could change the incentives and outcomes, they also imply some inefficiency which usually makes people worse off. Such matters are not black and white, you can't just steer the society with policies as you want totally ignoring economic effects policies produce.

Markets do exist within a set of rules and they always have. Markets can be self adjusting if there is healthy competition. What has been a much much bigger resounding failure has been large scale socialism. Even China decided to leave Maoism and Marxism behind and become an autocratic capitalistic society.

> "let the magic invisible hand of the market work, and all will be great".

Just because the hand is invisible doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that we can't see it. The "invisible hand" doesn't mean "natural market forces" as people think, it really means the "hands of the elites" who work behind the scenes. In modern capitalist societies, it's the cabal of bankers who work behind closed doors and direct economies.

> But apparently noone in power seem genuinely interested in sorting out this big problem in a way that would be advantageous to the European public (not even mentioning the climate).

Europe is trying to some degree - like hosting ITER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Until there is a revolution in energy generation, the world will continue to run on fossil fuels. There is no viable alternative. And fossil fuel use is only going to increase as ASEAN, India and africa further industrialize.

I’m Danish and I’m surprised this is a study. It’s well known that a lot of our technical advantages in green energy comes from public investment (and not just money, policy) into making the change.

It’s kind of how Americans put people on the moon isn’t it? Sure the private sector is important, but they’re not necessarily going to move society in the direction you want, only government can do that.

That's also how France got its nuclear power.

It is actually a similar story. The oil crisis in the late 70s and the limited availability of coal prompted both countries to invest into solutions to limit reliance on other, potentially unstable nations.

Denmark went for wind power and France went for nuclear power. Originally, is was a question of national sovereignty more than it was about the environment. But now that we consider CO2 emission a little more seriously, it is a lead worth keeping, and policies are made to help.

Electricity in France is almost 50% cheaper than in Germany and Denmark [1], so I guess nuclear was more cost effective.

[1] https://strom-report.de/electricity-prices-europe/

From your article, the tax contribution amount for Germany, Denmark and France are 53.6%, 67.8% and 35.5%. If we take those numbers to get the pre-tax price it becomes 13.7, 12.8 and 11.4 cents per KWh respectively.

So while France generates electricity a bit more cheaply than the other two the difference is not massive, and could be explained by economic disparity (GDP per capita is higher for both than France).

FYI France doesn't have any plan for fission nuclear in its future –

(even reduced to 50% of current production, which seems to be the currently professed plan^W wishful thinking)

– unless of course it's being for now kept as a complete secret from the general population.

But we've pretty much reached the moment when new reactors have to start to be MASSIVELY built to start replacing the aging ones in a decade or so (it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor !), so again, I doubt that there actually IS a plan out there.

(A third possibility is that they are planning to keep the current reactors working waaay past their expected life duration, which is extremely reckless, and is certain to one day blow up in an international scandal, hopefully only metaphorically.)

EDF is building the new reactors in the UK so it is retaining experience in how to do it.

There's also Flamanville in France, which has been a complete disaster when it comes to construction. As well as one project in Finland.

Did EDF learn anything from the two EPR that were built in China? Or was that just a pure sale of the design?

The clusterfuck that is Le Creusot (and in parallel Kobe Steel !) begs to differ…

It's like in Germany, Solar got the greatest boost at a time when it was still really inefficient to use but it received government subsidies. After they stopped the subsidies growth stopped despite technical advances. The good news about this is probably that whether to use regenerative energy is an actual choice and mature enough building blocks to make the switch probably already exist.

But in the end it was the Chinese solar companies that reaped the money from the subsidies as they dominated the industry. This is true for all of the EU, not just Germany.

Yeah, but maybe if in the end you get a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) over time curve for solar that falls off like a cliff [0] it was kind of worth it?

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-now-cheaper-than-grid-elec... (that's for China specifically, but the shape is the same everywhere.)

Interesting, how much does the on-grid solar cost compared to off-grid ?

Also, they seem to be mostly talking about cities... which already have an electrical grid !

I was also surprised a study was done to write about government policy incentives. Seems obvious.

USA has a policy to subsidize corn production. This has led to a huge chemical-doused monocrop, corn syrup in most packaged food, and blending it in to gasoline fuel as "E85".

None of these outcomes are particularly good.

Corn has a lot of political power in the US, especially in the Senate.

I'm not surprised a study was done at all. We need formal reports like this to catalog informal knowledge as formal knowledge, to make sure that such informal knowledge actually has basis in fact, and to quantify effects where possible.

A lot of the things we believe, we believe out of tradition or hearsay. So having someone check them is a very useful function, and necessary for good decision making at the executive level.

In what sense is this informal knowdledge? Government has always steered society in the way it wants to go. That's what a government is.

Many government policies are completely ineffective. Some are effective. Sometimes technology change and business activities are far more important than policy.

So cataloging what has happened is important.

I guess geography is a bigger reason than both tech and policy. Denmark probably have more coast per km2 than any other country in Europe.

Not sure about that, there are plenty of island-states in Europe that would surely have more coast per km2. Cyprus, Malta, Faroe Islands and more comes to mind.

Would they? Denmark isn’t a single land mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark: “Denmark proper, which is the southernmost of the Scandinavian countries, consists of a peninsula, Jutland, and an archipelago of 443 named islands”

Also, the Faroe Islands are part of the kingdom of Denmark (but if you go that way, you’ll also have to include Greenland, which has a low coastline/land area fraction)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of... puts Denmark at ≈150 m/km², Cyprus at ≈70, Malta at ≈700 (where does that come from? It’s only 3 islands. I would guess that’s using a different step size to measure coast length)

Hehe, yeah, true about Faroe Islands, my mistake.

Although, I'd still guess that full islands probably have more coast per km2 than half-islands (as Jutland has a tiny bit that is not coast)

Worth adding is that we probably never will get a precise answer to this question, as measuring coasts is a famously hard problem where the more detailed the measuring, the longer the coast gets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

So, how is it measured in practice ?

One option is to pick a yardstick size and keep that for all measurements. Disadvantage is that the size picked affects not only the coast lengths, but also relative differences and even rankings.

It also means scaling an area by a factor of N (typically) won’t scale its boundary length by N. That’s counterintuitive. That brings us to option 2: vary yardstick length with the size of the object being measured. Question then is: how exactly?

Alternatively, estimate the fractal dimension (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension) of the area and use that as the measure of coast length/area.

Other factors then amount of coast plays a role as well. An overcapacity of Danish wind energy can be converted into pumped hydroelectric storage in Norway.

Or simply not running the hydro. Which if there is sufficient reservoir capacity is even better.

Ye sure that is correct. "A lot of coast per km2 compared to other countries", then.

Scotland and Uk in general has vastly more potential wind energy than it could ever need, especially offshore wind in the north. It is being rapidly developed only now, as the cost of wind power in UK has plummeted

I would say this is somewhat misleading. It's not like other countries ran out of coast to put wind turbines on and that's the reason Denmark is ahead.

Ye well the turbines doesn't build them self ofcourse.

I just mean that Denmark probably has the best locations to put them in the whole of Europe. Flat land and alot of see dunes.

The article didn't touch that. Obvoiusly bad policies could have had them stuck at burning oil ...

Denmark has much more very low populated coast though. In NL we have plenty of turbines, curiously hardly on the coast.

> Sure the private sector is important, but they’re not necessarily going to move society in the direction you want, only government can do that.

Are you sure?

How about Intel, Apple, Spotify, TikTok, Veuve Cliquot and Tesla, for example?

Understandable.

The tech is not the problem, the people are.

A friend of mine sells these things and you could literally gift people money to build these things on their land, but many won't do it.

I guess the transaction costs are what's stopping people. Takes a non-trivial amount of time to evaluate whether it's a good idea. Might get easier after a while as social proof becomes available.

Is it fear of damage or danger that would keep them from taking it for free?

It's probably a lot simpler than that. They destroy the nice scenery and the money being offered isn't enough to compensate for that.

It is not just about the scenery, there is noise and light pollution as well.

Plus often the need to build high-power transmission lines, not to mention the land depreciation after 20-25 years (the lifespan of the average wind turbine). The cost of decommissioning just one wind turbine (and you probably have at least 3-4, building fewer in one site is rarely worth it) is likely to make the land it stands on completely worthless.

> likely to make the land it stands on completely worthless.

Sorry, what? Are they building the pylons with nuclear waste? How could land depreciate?

For one, you have an enormous block of concrete there now.

That won't cause any land depreciation or decrease in the value of the land. It may reduce the sale price, if concrete block has no value to a purchaser, but only by the amount that it would take to remove the concrete block. And if the land is so valueless that concrete removal significantly impacts pricing, the land wouldn't have been valuable enough to instal wind turbines in the first place!

So this sort of FUD seems to be extremely weak. Wind power is a massively profitable business, the amount of money that can be made dwarfs the capital costs of the construction, which in turn dwarfs the cost decommissioning of non-toxic materials.

The cost of decommissioning a wind turbine is a simple disincentive, approximately the same as installing it in the first place (although data on this seems scant and dependent on several factors.)

I had uncles who worked a lot in Altamont Pass back in the 70s and 80s. That was all heavily subsidized by US and CA governments.

> Policy, not tech, spurred Danish dominance in wind energy

Thank you, captain obvious.

I would have thought it was obviously Geography. It's "Dominance" is because it's a peninsula located right next to Germany, which acts as both a customer and a "ballast" to even out the production swings from wind with its massive amount of coal burning and natural gas imported from Putin.

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