Business
Company’s extreme wind strategy: Towns today, turbines tomorrow
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Vattenfall has 250 MW target for 2018-2019
Swedish energy company Vattenfall is going to extreme lengths for the sake of its Danish windfarms – buying up whole villages in rural Denmark, razing them to the ground and replacing the buildings with wind turbines, Børsen reports.
Mette Korsager, who is responsible for Vattenfall’s onshore wind projects in Denmark, told the business newspaper that the strategy was to make it easier for the company to achieve the goal of installing 250 MW of wind turbines in Denmark by 2018-2019. “We typically buy up farms in bad condition and demolish the farmhouse,” she said.
“Recently we bought most of a village to make a windpark.”
Helps the region, according to Vattenfall
That village is Kølby in northern Jutland, and Vattenfall plans to acquire a total of 20 properties.
Korsager told Børsen the strategy served a number of purposes. “We solve the problem of unsellable properties in peripheral regions,” she said.
“We solve the problem of neighbours being critical of wind farms, and we make it easier to reach agreements about the installation of wind turbines at the municipalities because we go in and help them by developing problem areas.”