Hello SuperForest!
I wanted to share with you a story of renewable energy and community that I found quite inspiring: for the last 12 years, the approx. 4000 residents of the small Danish island of Samsø have undertaken, with government support, but no grants or funds, to convert almost entirely to renewable energy through a combination of community owned wind turbines, district heat plants (run on local biomass) and offshore turbines (installed to offset the emissions of the island’s transport) – to the extent that the island is now not just self-sufficient, but produces 140% of the energy it consumes and is exporting energy back to the mainland.
I was particularly excited to hear of this as my family used to vacation in a summer house near Kalundborg and I remember visits to Samsø as a child – it was pretty windy. It’s awesome to see a whole island carbon-neutral, but what’s really exciting is how this was fueled by the engine of community and the individuals who cared enough to give the community a kickstart!
In 1997 Samsø won a competition by the Danish government to be designated the country’s “renewable energy island”. However, this did not come with funding or third party investment. Initially, there was little interest in participating: Samsø is predominantly a farming, self-professedly conservative, rural community, but individuals like Søren Hermansen (then a local teacher, now one of TIME magazine’s environmental heroes of 2008) persuaded them that it was both doable and not just good for the environment, but good for the Samsingers! Hermansen told the New Yorker:
“One reason to live here can be social relations,” he said. “This renewable-energy project could be a new kind of social relation, and we used that.” Whenever there was a meeting to discuss a local issue—any local issue—Hermansen attended and made his pitch. He asked Samsingers to think about what it would be like to work together on something they could all be proud of. “People on Samsø started thinking about energy,” Ingvar Jørgensen, a farmer who heats his house with solar hot water and a straw-burning furnace, told me. “It became a kind of sport.”
A key part of the project has been the ownership of the wind turbines by residents (and others) through co-operatives, this avoided much of the “NIMBYism” that many proposed turbine projects face – as Jesper Kjem says in The Jordan Times, “in areas where private companies just throw up wind turbines, residents see them as intrusive. But when people actually own and benefit from them they don’t mind seeing a turbine in their backyard”.
The Samsø project has generated plenty of international media interest and now the island receives visits from researchers, eco-tourists and politicians from around the world and Jesper Kjems recently attended the first Euro-Jordanian renewable energy conference to share the Samsø experience and what it can offer to other communities – “make two city blocks 100% renewable, then maybe the next two will follow”.
This seems a nice example of SuperForest spirit – to quote SuperForester Jason “ordinary people doing extraordinary things” and inspiring others in the process!
Check out the Samsø Energy Academy site (and many thanks to the delightful blog of Mr Thomas Lund-Sørensen, Danish Ambassador to Jordan).
Love!
Patricia
Svajerløb 2009!
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