Through the history of modern wind energy in Denmark, this article examines the entanglement between technology and governance. I argue that the development of modern wind energy in Denmark and the Danish wind industry’s later role in the global rise of wind energy were a result not just of human decisions. Instead, technological artefacts and technological knowledge played a crucial role as well. Wind turbines and technological knowledge of wind from the middle of the 20th century onwards became important nodes in the sociotechnical networks that revived wind energy. The Danish government was vital for the development, but crucial was also a bottom-up process. While applied science did play an important role, rules of thumb and other forms of technological knowledge based on craftsmanship gave Danish wind energy design an advantage compared to expensive and relatively unsuccessful wind energy research projects abroad especially in Germany and the US. In addition, the relatively small turbines from the 1970s to the 1990s lent themselves to cooperative ownership due to their particular material properties. Based on scholarship on Danish wind energy development and using approaches from the philosophy of technology and from STS, I show that in the emergence of wind energy as an aspect of global environmental governance, technological artefacts and practical forms of technological knowledge were crucial. While studies of global environmental governance often focus on international decisions made by experts in formally powerful positions, this article foregrounds technological material artefacts and technological knowledge and thus provides an alternative perspective on how global environmental governance materializes.

Since the 1970s, after starting from small, grassroots-inspired businesses, Danish wind energy has become industrialized and took on the form of global corporations operated from European centers. Using Taiwan as a steppingstone, those corporations are increasingly active in the Asia-Pacific region. We show that through its technological legacy and the narrative of pioneering wind energy, Denmark serves as a model of what offshore wind can be for Taiwan and what Taiwan can be for offshore wind. Based on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we identify three prevalent imaginaries in Denmark and Taiwan: The first imaginary applicable to the early phase of wind energy development in Denmark pictures wind energy as a clean, natural, locally empowering, and anti-capitalist energy source. It was succeeded by a second imaginary of wind energy as a modern “win-win” solution to climate change and a means to green growth. In Taiwan today, a third imaginary is aligned with the political planning tradition of Taiwan as a developmental state. It evokes wind energy as a means of green industrial nation building. Based on this analysis, we argue that sociotechnical imaginaries are dynamic, and that this is closely linked to their characteristic of being co-produced. 

This article examines how different environmental concerns come in conflict with each other by exploring the meeting between offshore wind farms and the Taiwanese white dolphin. The article also shows how the development of wind energy in Taiwan is historically linked to a longer trajectory of industrial expansion. In the past, the dolphins living along the west coast of Taiwan were considered part of the much larger population of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins in the waters of Hong Kong and China. However, in 2002, it was discovered that the Taiwanese White Dolphin is in fact a subspecies. This meant that the heavily industrialised west coast is home to the only marine mammal endemic to the waters of Taiwan. The dolphins were listed as a critically endangered subspecies by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Environmentalists turned the dolphin into a symbol of the unscrupulous exploitation of Taiwan’s coastal areas and a tool against the laissez-faire approval of environmentally harmful practices and projects. When offshore wind development began, the dolphins became part of a much more complicated struggle. While bycatch in gill and trammel fishing has been the largest problem for the dolphins, offshore wind farms could deal the final blow to the subspecies that currently counts around 60 individuals. This article shows various effects of the existence and scientific awareness of the Taiwanese White Dolphin and its meeting with offshore wind farms: The case of the Taiwanese White Dolphin challenges the image of offshore wind energy as green and pushes the offshore wind industry to think in new solutions to conservation issues. The Taiwanese white dolphin is also used as a symbol by environmental NGOs in a struggle over Taiwan’s environment, that dates to the 1980s and is part of a longer global friction between different environmental and social concerns such as nature conservation, pollution, land use by locals, and climate change.

The article points to a new and different role for corporate actors in global environmental governance. In 2017, Taiwan’s electricity act was amended, and the otherwise completely state-controlled electricity market was partly liberalised allowing for corporate purchase of renewable electricity. Important for the decision to amend the electricity act was pressure from Google who wanted to buy renewable electricity for its data centre in Taiwan. Since then, corporate demand for renewable electricity surged in Taiwan resulting in strong political pressure to increase the country’s renewable energy capacity. From a historical perspective, this article examines current corporate demand for renewable electricity in Taiwan. There are two major sources of this demand, first, renewable energy targets set by multinational corporations with suppliers in Taiwan, and second, the European Carbon Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) that puts a carbon fee on goods imported in the EU. This article focuses on the effects of corporate renewable energy targets especially those set by members of the business initiative RE100. RE100 brings large business from all around the world together in a pledge to be supplied by 100% renewable electricity at the latest by the year 2050. CBAM and RE100 in combination turned Taiwanese industry from slightly reluctant towards the government’s climate initiatives to strongly asking for increase of Taiwan’s renewable energy capacity. The article focuses on Taiwan as an export-oriented economy that relies on advanced technology manufacturing such as flat panel displays and especially semiconductors. It shows how it was a major pressure on Taiwanese industry when Apple in 2020 announced a target of making its entire supply chain carbon neutral by 2030. I examine how this pressure influenced offshore wind development and show how it disrupted ongoing development as purchasing and financing mechanisms were being reshuffled.