Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark's Renewable Energy Island

Article Science & Technology Studies 30(1) Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island: Not Another NIMBY Story Irina Papazu Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark/ [email protected] Abstract The Danish island Samsø is world-famous as Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island. 21 wind turbines supply the island’s electricity. Today, public hostility toward a projected nearshore wind farm of the island’s preserved northern coast is growing. This paper takes its main theoretical cue from Gomart and Hajer’s (2003) call to open up political questions to empirical inquiry and to pay attention to the material settings in which political questions unfold. The paper seeks to make sense of the islanders’ unexpected opposition to a new wind farm, and it does so through a critique of the unexperimental and depoliticizing attitude – found in the empirical case as well as in some academic scholarship – of the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) logic. Replacing the NIMBY logic of closing down deliberation with an empirical and ‘cosmopolitical’ (Stengers, 2005) approach to open up the space of politics to close investigation, the paper focuses on the empirical settings which give the controversy its specif c shape and asks how the projected wind farm is interrogated, negotiated and recast as it travels through the socio-material politics of the wind controversy. Keywords: NIMBY, renewable energy, controversy studies Introduction An idyllic landscape – rolling, green hills, blue sky, speaker goes on, the Bay of Aarhus will have its the Danish f ag on a pole – appears on the com- own wind farm, a farm in which everyone will be puter screen accompanied by light music. A hand able to invest. “The wind turbine guild of the Bay enters the picture, waters a patch of land, and of Aarhus is for you” (www.vaab.dk). from the soil shoot baby wind turbines, perfectly The stop-motion promotion f lm on the wind nested among the trees and grass of the hills. The turbine guild VAAB’s website (www.vaab.dk) is wind turbines are picked up by a pair of hands and accompanied by black and white videos in which put into the water at the foot of the hills while a members of the guild - teachers, students, nurses speaker talks about how in Denmark for many - explain why they have joined the project. Their years now, wind turbines have delivered environ- statements center on the importance of being mentally friendly, CO2 neutral electricity. Soon, the part of a positive change in society; they talk 4 Papazu Figure 1. Screenshot from the promotion video on www.vaab.dk. about being granted a say in a meaningful project, tion in motion, transforming the rural island exercising their democratic duties as citizens, and landscape into one marked by on- and of shore leading Denmark towards a fossil free future. wind turbines, district heating plants and solar Meanwhile, on Samsø, an island of four systems. Ten years from 1997 the islanders had thousand inhabitants in the Bay of Aarhus. A man, managed the transition to energy self-suf ciency the vice-president of VAAB and Samsø resident, is and could call themselves ‘CO2 negative’, thanks to walking in the preserved hills of northern Samsø the surplus electricity produced by of shore wind – hills which bear no small resemblance to the turbines which is exported to the mainland to landscape in the f lm described above. According of set the islanders’ transportation practices which to an islander, the vice-president knew that if remain fossil fuel intensive. certain members of the island community were This article examines how and why on this to oppose the wind farm the project’s realiza- Renewable Energy Island still engaged in alter- tion would be jeopardized, so the vice-president native energy initiatives resistance is mobilised went to the homes of key islanders, hoping to against a new wind project. The aim is to go put a lid on the protests to come over a cup of beyond the tendency to write of public resistance cof ee (interview1, Samsø resident, Nov 2013). as NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) reactions and take Despite his efforts, soon after the announce- a closer look at the dynamics at play in this unlikely ment of the wind project in the bay area called case of opposition against renewable energy (RE). Mejlf ak, protests broke out on the island, turning Without a deeper understanding of the dynamics the project into a heated political issue and the of opposition encountered by many large-scale development of the wind farm into a sociotechno- RE projects, the road toward the de-carboniza- logical controversy. tion of our societies will be bumpy at best. How This is the story of the still unfolding Mejlf ak do the Mejlflak turbines become controversial controversy as seen from the island of Samsø. objects on Samsø? is the question that will guide Samsø is not just any peripheral farming and the inquiry. The analysis will be structured around tourism island. In 1997, Samsø was appointed the settings or forms (Gomart & Hajer, 2003) in Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island by the which the controversy comes to life: the project’s Ministry of Energy, a nomination that set an environmental impact assessment report, the island-wide, locally managed energy transi- public hearing process, the newspaper debate, 5 Science & Technology Studies 30(1) the public meeting and the reactualised role of at Mejlf ak” (www.aarhusbugtenog-kyster.dk) as Samsø’s previous experiences with RE projects. well as the previously mentioned vice-president of the wind turbine guild behind the Mejlf ak project Materials and Methods development, a farmer who also played a central part in the REI project. Of the citizens I interviewed I conducted f eldwork on Samsø in the fall of 2013 who are not part of the project some expressed and spring of 2014. For f ve months, I lived on the critical opinions while others expressed surprise island and took part in the everyday life and work that a wind project could meet such resistance on at the Energy Academy, the public non-profit a renewable energy island. organization behind most of Samsø’s energy ini- The interviews were conducted at an early tiatives. I considered the ten Energy Academy phase in the Mejlflak project. The business employees my colleagues, attended relevant model and building contractors not yet in place, meetings and executed minor tasks for them. In what was completed was the siting, the environ- addition to countless informal conversations with mental impact assessment and related reports Academy employees and other islanders, I car- as well as the public hearing process. During the ried out some thirty semi-structured interviews months in which I discussed the project with with central island actors as well as with Energy the islanders, people generally felt in the dark Academy employees and ploughed through regarding the progress of the project, as the reports, newspaper articles and books about developers seemed to have drawn the curtains Samsø. During my f eldwork, I hardly came across after the initial publicity phase. This article focuses any negative accounts of the Renewable Energy on the publicity phase, the phase dominated by 1 Island (REI) project . This led me to focus primar- public meetings, hearings and debate. It is the ily on the islanders’ positive experiences with the phase in which the controversy has found its community-driven renewable energy project, and most visible and loud expressions and where all I largely came to view Samsø’s energy transition kinds of records of the case are readily accessible as a success story without strong signs of disa- (Venturini, 2010: 264). greement or contestation. But an ongoing conf ict I have not interviewed the project developers. caught my attention: the controversy surrounding They make their views clear in numerous articles, the Mejlf ak nearshore wind farm project. reports, minutes of meetings in the wind turbine As part of my f eldwork, my investigation of the guild, in communication materials as well as Mejlf ak case was one focus point among others. through their actions. The aim of this article is not The data material supporting this analysis consists to provide a balanced, in the journalistic sense, of qualitative interviews with citizens based on account of the development of an RE project, but Samsø – both summer house owners and full time to apply a view from Samsø in order to further residents - and ethnographic f eld notes along our understanding of opposition to RE projects. I with publicly available documents, websites, investigate how positions of resistance commonly newspaper articles and readers’ letters related disqualif ed as NIMBYism (Not In My BackYard) to the Mejlf ak project (all documents accessed can be appreciated as positions from which state- and newspaper searches conducted between ments are made that can help articulate the issues September 2013 and April 2014). at stake and make contributions to the def nition The Mejlf ak project was discussed in f fteen and understanding of the object of concern. My of my thirty interviews: three of the municipal hope is that such a deepened understanding of cials (including the director of the technical of positions of resistance might point to more and environmental administration in Samsø constructive ways to approach the planning of Municipality and the head of tourism and business the RE projects integral to a future less dependent on the island) made critical comments about the on fossil fuels. Moreover, by approaching the project, as did two Energy Academy employees. planning of large, potentially controversial I interviewed the spokesperson of the protest projects as genuinely political and democratic group “Southern Jutlanders Against Wind Turbines exercises involving the entire af ected community, 6 Papazu we might learn how CO2 emission reductions can related venues in which policy-making is known a give rise to community development rather than priori to take place.

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