Energy Wind
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Table of contents
Introduction
“We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly—but surely—be left behind.”
-Mike Bowlin, chairman and CEO of ARCO (now BP), speech in Houston, 9 Feb 1999
As the quotation already clearifies alternative fuels are nessecary to support our energy demand. This paper will focus on one of the alternative fueles, namely: wind energy, within the Dutch market with special focus on innovation. Innovations will include product, process, transaction and business model innovations as defined by Jacobs (2007). In order to be able to study the market and the corresponding innovations we took Nuon as focal company to represent the main actor in the industry; the energy producer/supplier. This will help us answer our main question: How important is innovation in the wind energy market?
In order to be able to answer this question we had several interviews with different players from different positions in the market and used different scientific models to assess the power balance in the market and the driving force to change/innovate. After assessing the most important lessons from these models we will come up with a conclusion on the importance of innovation in the wind energy market. Although we tried to give an complete view, we couldn’t include all information we found due to restrictions in time and size.
In our research we primarily used interviews (both direct and indirect) to get specific data from companies. We succeeded to interview the most important actors in the industry, with exception of the Dutch parliament. Interviews were taped, issued, translated and included in appendices. In this process of issuing some simplifications had to be made to create a coherent image of the interview. Next to interviews we used secondary data mostly from internet. Main sources here were CBS.nl (for
Table of contents
Introduction
“We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly—but surely—be left behind.”
-Mike Bowlin, chairman and CEO of ARCO (now BP), speech in Houston, 9 Feb 1999
As the quotation already clearifies alternative fuels are nessecary to support our energy demand. This paper will focus on one of the alternative fueles, namely: wind energy, within the Dutch market with special focus on innovation. Innovations will include product, process, transaction and business model innovations as defined by Jacobs (2007). In order to be able to study the market and the corresponding innovations we took Nuon as focal company to represent the main actor in the industry; the energy producer/supplier. This will help us answer our main question: How important is innovation in the wind energy market?
In order to be able to answer this question we had several interviews with different players from different positions in the market and used different scientific models to assess the power balance in the market and the driving force to change/innovate. After assessing the most important lessons from these models we will come up with a conclusion on the importance of innovation in the wind energy market. Although we tried to give an complete view, we couldn’t include all information we found due to restrictions in time and size.
In our research we primarily used interviews (both direct and indirect) to get specific data from companies. We succeeded to interview the most important actors in the industry, with exception of the Dutch parliament. Interviews were taped, issued, translated and included in appendices. In this process of issuing some simplifications had to be made to create a coherent image of the interview. Next to interviews we used secondary data mostly from internet. Main sources here were CBS.nl (for