Diffusion of onshore wind power: Technological upscaling and national adoption patterns

Licentiate thesis, 2025

Understanding the mechanisms driving onshore wind power deployment is essential for accelerating national growth to meet climate mitigation targets. The global nature of the wind turbine market influences how the technology diffuses across countries. Recent adopters may be able to leverage turbine technology that has matured elsewhere, allowing them to "leapfrog" ahead and accelerate their expansion. Global development in wind technology, such as increasing turbine capacity, can also reshape country-level deployment patterns by altering site requirements. At the same time, siting of new wind projects faces challenges from growing public and political resistance.

A significant gap exists in the literature on how advancements in wind technology, particularly turbine upscaling, disseminate across countries and affect national growth. Global developments in wind parks also remain understudied, despite their relevance since turbines are rarely installed in isolation. Studies on subnational variations in wind deployment have also overlooked the effect of turbine upscaling and lack a theoretical framework for identifying allocation mechanisms. This thesis situates these research gaps within the broader technological diffusion literature and addresses them through findings presented in the appended publications.

Paper II investigates how global turbine upscaling influences national deployment using wind power data from 28 countries. The findings reveal that the mass customization of turbine technology enables late adopters to access the latest generation of larger turbines directly from the global market, bypassing earlier smaller models. However, the advantage of turbine upscaling alone cannot accelerate growth. Project-level analysis shows that wind park sizes follow no consistent global trends but instead correlate with national factors such as public participation in decision-making and population distribution.

Paper I examines the drivers behind uneven subnational distribution of onshore wind deployment, focusing on Swedish municipalities as a case study. The analysis employs a theoretically grounded framework combining techno-economic, socio-technical, and political perspectives from energy transition literature. The findings show that deployment patterns evolved alongside turbine upscaling and diffusion stages. In the early formative phase, small-scale wind power emerged in municipalities that had agricultural land and prior wind deployment experience. As large-scale wind installations became more common, political factors such as supportive siting policies and high voter participation grew in importance.