Blowing in the Wind? Explaining the Divergent Rise of Off-shore Wind Power in Denmark and Spain

This proposal deals with the rise of off-shore wind power policies in Europe. It aims to understand the implications of multi-level governance for sustainable energy programmes through a comparison based on the method of difference. For this purpose, two regional off-shore wind farms' projects were examined in Spain (Las Cruces del Mar, Andalusia) and in Denmark (Anholt, Midtjylland) from January 2015 to February 2016. Though the former faced considerable problems of implementation and was finally abandoned; the latter consolidated as one of the leading off-shore wind farms in the world. Both cases were analysed according to common criteria (legal framework, timeframe, seashore configuration, available technology, policy actors, instruments, integration of civil society) in order to identify the drivers leading to success or failure in the field of off-shore energy production. The conclusion draws lessons from the convergent and divergent trends observed in the two case studies.