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Sustainable energy has been on the political agenda in Denmark for decades. This chapter will highlight how wind turbine production quite unforeseen became a great success in Denmark before the turn of the Millennium. An integrative public leadership approach using a mix of supportive institutional designs and instruments, combined with an unexpected bottom-up pressure for alternatives to nuclear power, promoted ways for wind turbine innovation and production in the 1970s. After the turn of the Millennium, being a huge financial success creating many new jobs and export has it developed into a cluster based on huge investments and professionalised developers. The comprehensive transition of wind turbine production in Denmark, from small scale to large scale, has however provided a counterproductive decrease in community commitment for local renewable energy production.

Denmark is known internationally as a climate frontrunner and not only due to wind turbine production and planning. The status is obtained by polycentric governance applied in cooperative-owned energy systems. The Danish response to climate change is a concerted effort of a plethora of public and private actors, providing a crucial momentum and robustness in climate politics not at least generated from a genuine civic society involvement. ‘The Danish Energy Model’; a withhold strategic effort to combine ambitious renewable energy goals, energy efficiency targets and political support of technical and industrial development has for four decades, succeeded in providing high levels of cheap energy supply, while partly reducing fossil fuel dependency at the same time.

The article compares the effect of European Union (EU)-Russian sanctions imposed in 2014 with the influence of fluctuating oil prices on Danish trade.

In this paper annual import and export trade data between Denmark and 152 countries from the period 2002–18 were computed in STATA/SE 16.1 using the Gravity model to evaluate the effect of economic sanctions and the price of oil.

Results showed that the impact from the fall of oil price exceeded the negative effect from sanctions on Danish export. Additionally, the analyses suggest that the fall in oil price had a negative effect on Danish import. Even so, Danish import significantly increased due to growth in supplies of energy resources from Russia.

This study explains the overlapping effects of EU-Russian sanctions and fluctuating oil prices on Danish trade. This methodology can be expanded to encompass multiple countries using the two-sided Gravity model.

In this concluding chapter, the editors provide an overall assessment of contemporary Danish public governance based on the main findings in the preceding chapters of the edited volume. Surveying the Danish governance responses to contemporary mega-challenges, the chapter reflects on policy implications and contemplate the future of both research and practice related to public administration, politics and governance in Denmark. The chapter argues that recent public governance reforms have turned the Danish welfare state into a mix of a neo-Weberian state and an enabling state, which deploys its considerable resources to create economic growth for the benefit of the large majority of Danes, to satisfy the needs of citizens and businesses and to develop collaborative solutions to complex problems. While the chapter concludes that this modified version of the well-known universal welfare state is largely apt for meeting the mega-challenges of the twenty-first century, recent reforms seeking to enhance job-seeking incentives for the unemployed and to integrate immigrants have resulted in new forms of marginalisation of weaker societal groups. Moreover, evolving problems such as climate change, an ageing population and digital citizen privacy will require further public governance reforms in the years to come.

In scientific works on forecasting price volatility (of which the overwhelming majority, in comparison with works on price forecasting) for energy products: crude oil, natural gas, fuel oil, the authors compared the effectiveness of forecasting models of generalized autoregressive heteroscedasticity (Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic model, GARCH) with regression of support vectors for futures contracts. GARCH models are a standard tool used in the literature on volatility, and the vector machine nonlinear regression model is one of the machine learning methods that has been gaining huge popularity in recent years. The authors have shown that the accuracy of volatility forecasts for energy and aluminum prices significantly depends on the volatility proxy used. The model with correctly defined parameters can lead to fewer prediction errors than GARCH models when the square of the daily yield is used as an indicator of volatility in the evaluation. In addition, it is difficult to choose the best model among GARCH models, but forecasts based on asymmetric GARCH models are often the most accurate. The work is based on a model with a representative investor who solves the problem of optimizing utility in a two-period model. The key assumption of the model is the homogeneity of energy and aluminum investor preferences, that is, preferences do not change over time. There are also works with an attempt to solve this problem in a continuous state space. A completely new theory has been put forward that allows predicting the movement of the underlying asset without using historical data, so this topic is very relevant.

In the twenty-first century, societies around the world are facing a wide range of daunting global mega-challenges: poverty, unemployment, income inequality, unequal distribution of political power, ageing populations, uncontrolled migration, segregated urbanisation, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and a massive decrease in biodiversity. In recent years, politicians, journalists and academic observers have singled out the Nordic countries, Denmark in particular, as model societies of trusting and happy people that have handled many of these challenges with remarkable effectiveness. And yet others warn against ‘becoming Denmark,’ painting a picture of a dysfunctional, socialist nightmare with high taxes, low job motivation and a general lack of private initiative. In this introductory chapter, the editors cut through the noise of the international debate and set the scene for the nuanced analyses presented here of contemporary public governance in Demark and its capacity to tackle some of the most pressing problems of our time. Specifically, the chapter discusses various conceptualisations of the Danish welfare state, delineates some of its most important historical and structural traits and outlines the main empirical features of contemporary Danish public governance. Finally, it outlines the structure of the book and briefly introduces each of its subsequent chapters.

The objective is to describe and evaluate the development of a novel planning tool for end‐use efficiency in the built environment and for infrastructural changes in the energy system.

After describing problems related to further reduce heat demand in the Danish built environment, the geographical nature of the planning task is discussed. The requirements are then translated into concepts for the development of a general method, which is implemented in a practical design of a heat atlas. Typical applications are described and discussed.

It was found that the availability of the extensive public databases in Denmark make feasible the development and application of a highly detailed geographical information base for end use and infrastructure planning and analysis. It was also realised that the development has much higher potentials than explored in this paper. On the other hand, the complex geography of the urban/rural boundaries of cities requires extra care when using this approach.

Unfortunately, the results of this report are only directly applicable for Denmark, which maintains public databases on the built environment and socio‐demography with a very high standard of detail and coverage. The research presented here may require further development of empirical methods of the relation between energy demand and physically and socially mapped data. On the other hand, the research may contribute to better data for analyses in the techno‐economic analyses of future energy systems, which now can be carried out for arbitrary geographical units, independent of administrative boundaries.

The method presented here may be further developed as a practical tool to be used to revive the municipal and regional energy planning, either by technical consultants or by local governments. Even a publicly accessible, web‐based tool is feasible.

The paper describes how existing data in society can be assembled to a novel method to be used within energy planning, and environmental management as a whole. A system of the one developed does not exist as yet. On the other hand it builds upon existing traditions in energy planning and local governance.

The purpose of this article is to investigate how facilities management (FM) units navigate Energy Service Company (ESCO) collaborations, here defined as examples of public collaborative innovation within the context of FM. The driving motivation is to inform and inspire internal FM units of local institutions on how to navigate and manage collaboration of different, intra- and inter-organisational actors throughout ESCO projects.

A deductive research methodology was applied based on the first ten ESCO projects in Danish municipalities between 2008 and 2012.

A model of FM roles in FM public innovation is proposed. The internal FM unit coordinates between clients and end users by acting as translator and demonstrator and collaborates with the ESCO company to implement the energy renovation (FM processor).

The data were collected from a limited sample of ESCO collaborations in Denmark. Future research should thus investigate collaborative innovation in ESCO (and other forms of private–public) collaborations outside of Denmark.

Not only should FM units clarify what different stakeholders expect from an ESCO collaboration, but also they should translate stakeholders’ expectations into actual goals and objectives; process them together with the ESCO company; demonstrate their execution to all stakeholders throughout the process, not just when closing the collaboration.

This paper contributes to FM innovation research by exploring FM innovation in the public sector and by depicting the coordinating role of local governments’ internal FM units engaging in public–private collaborative innovation.

Climate change means that buildings must greatly reduce their energy consumption. It is however paradoxical that climate mitigation in Denmark has created negative energy and indoor climate problems in housing that may be made worse by climate change. A literature review has been carried out of housing schemes where climate mitigation was sought through reduced space heating demand, and it is shown that extensive problems with overheating exist. A theoretical study of regulative and design strategies for climate mitigation in new build housing has therefore been carried out, and it is shown that reducing space heating with high levels of thermal insulation and passive solar energy results in overheating and a growing demand for cooling.

Climate change is expected to reduce space heating and increase cooling demand in housing. An analysis of new build housing using passive solar energy as a climate mitigation strategy has therefore been carried out in relation to future climate change scenarios. It is shown that severe indoor comfort problems can occur, questioning the relevance of passive solar energy as a climate mitigation strategy. In conclusion, a theoretical study of the interplay between climate adaptation and mitigation strategies is carried out, with a cross-disciplinary focus on users, passive design and active technologies. It is shown that the cumulative use of these strategies can create an adaptation buffer, thus eliminating problems with overheating and reducing energy consumption. New build housing should therefore be designed in relation to both current and future climate scenarios to show that the climate mitigation strategies ensure climate adaptation.

This chapter analyses the recovery of the Danish economy from the crisis of the 1980s, its elevation to a bit of an ‘economic miracle’ or at least an ‘employment miracle’ from 1995 to 2005 and its subsequent decline during the financial crisis, which revealed more long-standing problems that precluded a quick recovery. The solution of Denmark's structural balance of payment problems in the early 1990s paved the way for long-term prosperity, and Denmark managed the challenges of globalisation and deindustrialisation almost without social costs. However, an accumulation of short-term policy failures and credit liberalisation facilitated a credit and housing bubble, a consumption-driven boom and declining competitiveness. In broad terms, the explanation is political; this includes not only vote- and office-seeking strategies of the incumbent government but also ideational factors such as agenda setting of economic policy. Somewhat unnoticed – partly because of preoccupation with long-term challenges of ageing and shortage of labour – productivity and economic growth rates had slowed down over several years. The Danish decline in GDP 2008–2009 was larger than in the 1930s, and after the bubble burst, there were few drivers of economic growth. Households consolidated and were reluctant to consume; public consumption had to be cut as well; exports increased rather slowly; and in this climate, there was little room for private investments. Financially, the Danish economy remained healthy, though. Current accounts revealed record-high surpluses after the financial crisis; state debt remained moderate, and if one were to include the enormous retained taxes in private pension funds, net state debt would de facto be positive. Still, around 2010–2011 there were few short-term drivers of economic growth, and rather unexpectedly, it turned out that unemployment problems were likely to prevail for several years.

This paper aims to show how collective embodiment with physical objects (i.e. props) support young children’s learning through the construction of liminal blends that merge physical, virtual and conceptual resources in a mixed-reality (MR) environment..

Building on Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP), we apply the Learning in Embodied Activity Framework to further explore how liminal blends can help us understand learning within MR environments. Twenty-two students from a mixed first- and second-grade classroom participated in a seven-part activity sequence in the STEP environment. The authors applied interaction analysis to analyze how student’s actions performed with the physical objects helped them to construct liminal blends that allowed key concepts to be made visible and shared for collective sensemaking.

The authors found that conceptually productive liminal blends occurred when students constructed connections between the resources in the MR environment and coordinated their embodiment with props to represent new understandings.

This study concludes with the implications for how the design of MR environment and teachers’ facilitation in MR environment supports students in constructing liminal blends and their understanding of complex science phenomena.