COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- The Danish government is pushing ahead with one of Europe's most ambitious alternative-energy projects, a program that would make Denmark the first country to use wind power as a significant contributor to its national electricity grid.
In a report in February, the Danish Environment Ministry set out a planning procedure for building additional windmills either in clustered parks or as individual free-standing units, bringing municipal governments into the decision-making process for the first time.
The report removed a major obstacle to further large-scale development of what is already Europe's biggest exploitation of wind energy.
Only California has installed greater wind-power capacity.
"The report leads us to believe another 1,000 megawatts can easily be installed," said Per Krogsgaard, a partner in a Danish energy consulting firm, BTM Consult, near the western town of Ringkoebing.
"It is a good decision," added Finn Godtfredsen, responsible for wind-power development at the Danish Energy Agency in Copenhagen.
The country is in the final stages of an initial expansion that will raise wind-power capacity to 500 megawatts by the end of next year. A tripling of this amount would enable Denmark to cover nearly 10 percent of its electricity requirements through wind energy, Mr. Godtfredsen said.
And if the country's environmentalists have their way, Denmark's windmills could be producing close to 3,000 megawatts of power by the third decade of the next century, according to a series of longer-range scenarios developed by the Danish Energy Agency.
While Denmark's capacity is less than one-third of that installed in California (together, the two produce more than 90 percent of the globe's wind-generated electricity), Denmark's far longer history of windmill development -- and the pressures of working on a landmass one-tenth the size of California -- have helped make the country a global leader in wind-power technology.
Mr. Krogsgaard estimates, for example, that about half the 15,650 windmills now installed in California were produced in Denmark.
For a nation of 5 million people, whose prosperity is based mainly on their ability to export high-quality farm products and upscale consumer goods such as down comforters and expensive domestic furniture, such expertise in a sophisticated medium-tech field is unusual.
