Wind Cluster Denmark
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A Reporter at Large: The Island in the Wind
A REPORTER AT LARGE about a Danish community’s shift to renewable energy. Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. It has twenty-two villages and, for the past dozen years or so, it’s been the site of an unlikely social movement. In the late nineteen-nineties, most of the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants were heating their houses with oil and used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Wind power in Denmark
Denmark was a pioneer in developing commercial wind power during the 1970s, and today almost 50% of the wind turbines around the world are produced by Danish manufacturers such as Vestas and Siemens Wind Power along with many component suppliers. [ 1 ] Wind power provided 18.9% of electricity production and 24.1% of generation capacity in Denmark in 2008. [ 2 ] In 2012 the Danish government adopted a plan to increase the share of electricity production from wind to 50% by 2020. [ 3 ] [ edit ] History As concerns over global warming grew in the 1980s, Denmark found itself with relatively high carbon dioxide emissions per capita, primarily due to the coal-fired electrical power plants that had become the norm after the 1973 and 1979 energy crises of the 1970s. [ 4 ] Renewable energy became the natural choice for Denmark, decreasing both dependence on other countries for energy and global warming pollution.
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