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 form a school and draw public funding for it, and Tvind used that provision energetically. The first Continuation School, for students aged fourteen to eighteen, opened at Tvind in 1974; six more followed, along with six international ones. The first Free School, for pupils aged seven to sixteen, opened in 1976, and six more came after it. Alongside them ran the travelling folk high schools, which sent teachers and students abroad together with the stated ambition of raising living standards in the developing world.

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 has supplied the Tvind schools with power ever since. Its influence ran well past the fence line: Tvindkraft is credited with helping set off Denmark's wind turbine industry. In 2008 the European Association for Renewable Energy gave Tvind the European Solar Prize for education in recognition of the effort.

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 off in 1992. Then in 1996 Parliament passed a Special Act ending official support for the rest of the Tvind schools from 1 January 1997, singling them out from rules they would otherwise have qualified under. Three years later the Danish Supreme Court, sitting eleven judges strong, unanimously set the Special Act aside as a circumvention of the constitution — the first time in the constitution's history that the court had struck down an act of Parliament. Tvind won and never got the funding back. Its schools shifted instead toward students placed and paid for by municipal social services.

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 1992 Tvind's activities had "expanded far beyond pure school activities" — fruit plantations, farms, shoe factories and sawmills, aid agencies, second-hand clothing shops, and the leasing of property, ships and containers. In 1977 Tvind members founded Humana People to People, known in Scandinavia as UFF; its used-clothing collection bins now stand in tens of thousands across Europe and the United States. Investigators and former volunteers have alleged that the money raised through them served the network's leadership rather than the causes advertised on the bins. A 2016 BBC investigation with the Center for Investigative Reporting led Britain's Department for International Development to suspend payments to an affiliated charity.

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 2003. On 31 August 2006 the court acquitted Petersen, the Tvind spokesman Poul Jørgensen, and five co-defendants; only Sten Byrner, a former chair of Tvind's Humanitarian Foundation, was convicted of fraud, and he received a one-year conditional sentence. Prosecutors appealed at once. Petersen and four co-defendants left Denmark. Jørgensen, who stayed, was convicted in January 2009 and sentenced to two and a half years. In 2013 Petersen and four others were sentenced in absentia to a year in prison over the alleged embezzlement of millions of kroner from the Tvind Humanitarian Fund. As of 2016 they remained wanted by Interpol and were reported to be living in a coastal compound in Mexico.

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. The same movement produced parliamentary acts, court judgments, and a founder who has not appeared in a Danish courtroom since 2006. Standing at the foot of the tower, you see only one of those things.