This is a link from the Danish Wind Turbine Site windpower.org. It is a 12 page .pdf from 2007 that is already quaintly outdated in one minor respect - their estimated future oil price (of E52/bbl). Oops...but they aren't the only ones wrong in that department. The increase in oil prices just makes the economics of their 50% proposal that much more sensible:

http://www.windpower.org/media(1775,1033)/engelsk_resumé_ea_analyse.pdf

This is an overview/summary of a largely economic analysis of a plan to produce 50% of Denmark's electricity (on average) from wind turbines. Right now they produce a bit more than 20% of their electricity using wind turbines, but this should change in the next couple of years when another pair of ~ 200 to 250 MW offshore wind farms get installed.

Denmark's wind turbines are mostly community/small company/cooperatively owned, with the exception of most of the offshore units of which there is 426 MW of capacity. A very large number of the onshore units should be close to the "payoff point", where the capital used to buy and install these units is paid off. The government is also trying to have many of the smaller onshore units replaced with larger, more efficient ones.

Anyway, the key points are that the country is seriously thinking about getting at least 50% of their electricity from wind turbines. This is possible because they can use the large hydropower facilities in Norway and Sweden as power storage/augmentation, and they can also utilize the German grid to import and/or export electricity. The Nordic countries and Denmark/Germany already are interconnected, and this larger grid also buffers the variability of winds across Denmark.

And the lesson for the US? We have wind resources that are humongous compared to Denmark's. The same goes for Canada, although they have about 10% of our population/electricity demand, with the same wind resource, approximately, as exists in the US. And even though Denmark is a relatively small country with a stable population (population growth wise), we still have on-shore and offshore resources far greater on a per capita basis. We also have our own "Nordic Pool" potential - large mountains/tall hills located next to water, especially on the West Coast, as well as the Appalachians and related contiguous ranges for the East Coast.

At present, what we don't have is the will to do it. And that may be harder to change than the actual act of installing mass quantities of wind turbines and pumped hydro storage facilities (a 100 acre pond x 153 ft deep, or 200 acre pond x 77 ft deep, on a 2000 foot drop is rated at 8000 MW-hr, or 333 MW for a 24 hr period...not too shabby).

So, in case you are worried that pushing our country to a 50% wind power level is too original an idea...forget about it, this concept is now a "used one", not an original one. Of course, each country is a host of specific problems with respect to the details, but these are all solvable from a technical standpoint. The tough aspect is the political one. And also arranging things so that windpower can be profitable without government tax subsidies, but perhaps with other market mechanisms such as feed in laws. After all, when the exemptions start to add up to $50 billion, to $100 billion/year in taxes not paid, the system used to keep wind turbines going/develop the industry when it was relatively small has got to change. And for those who think that better wind turbines will drop the price of electricity...well, don't hold your breath on that one. Odds are, electricity from wind turbines will either stay about the same or increase in price a bit, which still keeps it reasonable, but not cheaper than subsidized polluting electricity.

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