Qualla: Tvind

Tvind: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit An-d, CC BY-SA 4.0. Twelve kilometres inland from the North Sea, on flat farmland near Ulfborg, a concrete tower carries three fibreglass blades above a cluster of school buildings. Teachers and students built it. They poured the tower, laid up the blades, and by 1978 the machine was feeding electricity into the grid — for years the largest electricity-producing wind turbine in the world. Tvindkraft is the simplest thing about Tvind, and the only part of the story nobody disputes. Everything else — the schools that spread across Denmark and then across continents, the inner circle called the Teachers Group, a fraud trial that ended in acquittal and then in an appeal nobody could serve — has been argued over in Danish courtrooms for half a century.

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Image: An-d | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tvind: A Farm, and a Loophole in the Constitution

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Volujustu, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mogens Amdi Petersen, born in Tønder in 1939, founded Tvind around 1970 as an experiment in alternative education. In 1972 the movement established its school centre on the Ulfborg farmland that gave it its name. The Danish constitution contains a provision that lets any group fo...

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Image: Volujustu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tvind: The Mill the Students Built

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit An-d, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the mid-1970s the Tvind community decided that the way to understand wind power was to build a wind turbine. Volunteers, teachers and students raised it themselves on the school grounds. When it came online it was the largest electricity-producing turbine in the world, and it ...

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Image: An-d | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tvind: The Special Act, and the First Time the Court Said No

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Volujustu, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 1970 to 1996 the Tvind schools received government money and government supervision under Denmark's ordinary rules for private schools. Support for the Necessary Teacher Training College — Det Nødvendige Seminarium, founded in 1972 to train volunteers — had already been cut ...

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Image: Volujustu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tvind: The Teachers Group

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit An-d, CC BY-SA 4.0. Behind the schools sat a body called the Teachers Group, and it generated most of the controversy. Former students and former employees have described it as a political cult. A 2001 case summary by Danish police and the Public Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime found that by 1...

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Image: An-d | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tvind: Acquitted, Then Gone

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anders Kjeldsen, CC BY 3.0. An Interpol warrant went out in 2000. In February 2002, FBI agents arrested Amdi Petersen while he was between international flights at Los Angeles International Airport, and a federal judge sent him to Denmark to face charges of tax fraud and embezzlement. The trial opened in 20...

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Image: Anders Kjeldsen | CC BY 3.0

Tvind: What Stands at Tvind Now

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Volujustu, CC BY-SA 4.0. The school centre is still there, and so is the turbine, turning after nearly five decades on most of its original components. That is the doubleness of the place. A group of teachers and teenagers on a Jutland farm built something the utilities of the day were not attempting. Th...

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Image: Volujustu | CC BY-SA 4.0