In 1991, Denmark inaugurated the world's first offshore wind farm at Vindeby, off the coast of the island of Lolland in the Baltic Sea, deploying eleven 450-kilowatt Bonus turbines in shallow coastal waters. The Vindeby project demonstrated that wind turbines could operate reliably in marine environments and exploit the stronger, more consistent winds available at sea. Denmark's pioneering offshore wind programme, backed by sustained government policy and public investment, established the offshore wind industry model that would eventually supply a significant fraction of global electricity by the 2020s.

The Danish offshore wind tradition emerged from a national culture deeply shaped by the sea — the poetry of the Norse and Danish literary tradition consistently made ocean and wind coterminous symbols of destiny, freedom, and danger. The Vindeby wind farm's installation in the Baltic, the sea that Scandinavian mythology linked to the realm of the dead and the journeys of the gods, gave the industrial harnessing of sea-wind a resonance within Danish cultural memory that environmental and landscape poets of the region have explored. The offshore wind image — turbines visible from shore — has become a recurring motif in contemporary Nordic ecopoetry.