Going green in Cancun

    The first thing I notice as the plane descends to land at the Copenhagen airport is the line of wind turbines rising out of the sound.

    They turn slowly in the breeze, graceful against the urban shore line. Along with the rest of the turbines around Denmark, they generate 20 percent of the nation’s power, according to Finn Mortensen, executive director of Climate Consortium Denmark.

    CCD is a public-private partnership made up of the Danish government and organizations representing an estimated 95 percent of all Danish businesses. With a 10 million budget, the seven-person office has been bringing foreign journalists, including me, and foreign officials to Denmark to see what the country has accomplished in the climate and energy field.

    Denmark will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference , COP 15, in December, and Mortensen is open about his motives for brining journalists to his country in advance of that conference.

    “We have a good story to tell,” he said.

    A big part of that story is four hours from Copenhagen on the island of Samsø.

    With just 4,100 residents, Samsø is a different from Copenhagen as Science Hill is Louisville. Copenhagen is a bustling international city of more than a million people on Denmark’s big island of Sjaelland. Samsø is a farming and tourist region dotted with small villages and houses with tile, tin and thatched roofs. It sits in the middle of the Kattegat, a thin, shallow sea that connects the Baltic and the North Sea, and the only way to reach it is by a two-hour ferry ride.

    What makes Samsø unique is its method of powering itself. Samsø claims to be carbon neutral, and it makes all of the power it needs – and more – from wind.

    As our ferry approached the island, I went to the top deck with Søren Hermansen, director of Samsø Energy Academy. Those 10 turbines, he explained, each produce enough power to run 2,000 homes, and there are only 2,000 homes on the whole island.

    The turbines in the sea are for selling power. All the power Samsø uses is produced by the 11 turbines on the island, each of which produces enough electricity for 600 homes. All that excess is transmitted by undersea cable to Jutland, the Danish peninsula. When the wind does not blow, which is very unusual, electricity flows in the other direction.

    But what is remarkable about Samsø is not that an island on the edge of the North Sea can produce electricity from wind, but how it paid to produce it. The 21 wind turbines that constitute the entire electrical generating capacity Samsø are owned by the municipal government of Samsø and 450 investors – island residents who answered an ad in the newspaper and bought shares in the turbines.

    Some farmers on the island, who were used to investing in large, expensive pieces of machinery, wanted to buy the turbines, but they were only allowed to on one condition, says Jesper Kijems, communications officer for the Energy Academy.

    “They said, ‘You can build one, but you have to set aside property for another one.”

    As a result, there is broad support for the turbines, and other environmental projects on the island such as a “district heating plants” that supply heat to villages by burning waste wheat straw to produce hot water. Virtually everyone is involved in the environmental effort, including local government, craftsmen, businesses, schools, and tourism officials.

    That involvement brand of democracy is necessary for any community expecting to make a system like the one in Samsø work, Kijems said. To Samsø residents, Samsø is the center of Denmark, the center of Europe and the center of the Universe. The residents didn’t make the commitment for the project to fight climate change; they did it for their own community.

    “It has to be local,” he said.

 

 

 

 

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