From Wind Turbines to Energy Islands: Wind as Model Power in Denmark

Abstract

This article explains how the fluctuating, ever-changing elemental entity of wind is constructed as a stable renewable energy resource through a global wind energy infrastructural model promoted by the Danish wind energy industry. Examining Denmark’s project to build the world’s first “Energy Islands,” or offshore wind energy hubs, the article accounts for how wind is shaped into “energy” as a media environment, just as wind as medium and milieu shapes the infrastructural forms of wind power. The article thinks through wind with the elemental orientations of “matter,” “molecule,” “milieu,” and “medium,” as well as the mediated conditions of its legibility, to explicate the global wind infrastructural model as a multimodal elemental media assemblage. Wind’s ontological qualities as an infrastructural medium are transduced through apparatuses of environmental data, such as graphical “island” figures and models of landscape featured on promotional websites, wind turbine test sites, and wind atlases that are constructed with numerical data and statistical models. The article argues that the metonymic visibility and invisibility of wind energy infrastructural components enable the territorialization as well as deterritorialization of wind through the strategic projection and displacement of spatial boundaries and geographical situatedness. This extends the infrastructural scope of wind power across various scales, which also contributes to a milieu of geopolitical and economic speculation. Although wind energy is projected as a stable resource, it should be described as a speculative milieu of long-term projections, intermittent changes, and sudden crises, which renders the “Green Transition” an uncertain landscape of environmental futures.