In 2002, Denmark inaugurated the Horns Rev offshore wind farm in the North Sea approximately 14 kilometres off the Jutland coast, deploying 80 Vestas turbines with a combined capacity of 160 megawatts — at the time the world's largest offshore wind farm. Horns Rev demonstrated that large-scale offshore wind generation was technically and commercially viable in open-sea conditions, providing crucial engineering data on turbine performance, maintenance challenges, and grid integration. The farm's success accelerated the global offshore wind industry and established Denmark and the North Sea as the world centre of wind energy innovation.

Horns Rev's spectacular visual impact — 80 turbines visible from the Danish and German coasts — made offshore wind a tangible, debated presence in the Scandinavian cultural landscape, generating literary and artistic responses ranging from celebration to elegy for an altered seascape. The North Sea, already deeply freighted with literary meaning from Norse saga through the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and W.S. Graham, acquired a new industrial wind-scape that contemporary Nordic and British poets have engaged with in thinking about the relationship between energy infrastructure and poetic landscape. The farm's aerodynamic cloud patterns, photographed widely, became iconic images of the renewable energy age.