100 Percent Renewable? One Danish Island Experiments with Clean Power

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WIND POWER: All told, the wind turbines on Samso supply more power than the residents need--Samso exports 80 million kilowatt-hours of wind-produced electricity annually--thus offsetting some of the island's nonrenewably powered activities, such as its cars, trucks and ferries.

One small island in Denmark is technically 100 percent powered by sustainable sources of energy. Could the experiment succeed anywhere else?

By David Biello

TRANEBJERG, Samso, Denmark—It can seem as if the icy, cutting wind off the North Sea never stops blowing on this Danish island in winter, bending back the grass, whipping straight the flags, and setting mammoth wind turbines to their stately spinning. That's good news for Samso's 4,000 or so inhabitants, seeing as they own shares in 20 of the 21 turbines that either tower over the island or rise from the offshore waters of the Kattegat Strait, which connects the Baltic and North seas.

Some people see wind turbines as eyesores or complain about the sound of their whirring blades, but Soren Hermansen, chief proselytizer for the island's renewable energy experiment and director of the Samso Energy Academy, disagrees. "If you own a share in a wind turbine it looks better, it sounds better," he says. "It sounds like money in the bank."

The land-based turbines are 50 meters tall with blades that stretch some 27 meters from end to end. The sea-based turbines are even more massive—63 meters high (not including the spike pounded into the seafloor beneath the waves) with 40-meter blades. A single such turbine can generate roughly eight million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year at a cost of $3 million per turbine (the onshore variety are cheaper, at just over $1 million).

Drawing on a Danish co-operative tradition that stretches back 150 years to raise the cash needed to build and run slaughterhouses and other community facilities, around one in 10 "Samsingers" owns at least a share in one of the turbines, which generates an annual check based on its output and the price of electricity. The turbines also have allowed all 4,000 residents to produce more energy from renewable resources than they consume, thereby eliminating, on balance, their emissions of carbon dioxide.

View Slide Show of Samso, the Renewable Energy Island

After all, a massive three-megawatt wind turbine "pays back" the carbon dioxide emitted in its making—mining iron, smelting steel, trucking blades, among other things—in roughly seven months of operation by displacing emissions from fossil fuel–fired power plants, according to Michael Zarin, director of government relations at the Denmark-based wind turbine–maker Vestas Wind Systems. Wind power is now responsible for 100 percent of Samso's electricity needs, 20 percent of all of Denmark's, and has become the largest single type of new electricity generation installed in the U.S. "There's nothing alternative about wind anymore," Zarin notes.

But Samso—an island of some 22 villages that is twice the size of Manhattan—does present an alternative view of the future. "It sounds like we did something extraordinary on this island," Hermansen says of the island's inhabitants who effectively remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than they contribute to it. (An average Dane adds some 10 metric tons of CO2 per year.) "We are just normal people—maybe a little naive, maybe a little egoistic, maybe boring—but this is about how we are going to make our normal life work."

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[Bobby+Umit 161]

Small island --- in the North Sea...

Can't see this working everywhere - but it's a good start.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Nice.