If America is a nation of SUVs, Denmark is one of bicycles. This is evident immediately upon arriving in Copenhagen: Hundreds of two-wheelers are parked at the central train station, and an army of cyclists cruise dedicated lanes on the city’s busiest avenues. Over the last three decades, the Danes have poured the equivalent of billions of dollars into research for improving green technologies and into subsidies to induce markets to embrace them. Today renewable energy sources, principally wind, generate roughly one-fifth of the country’s electricity.

Organic farmers Niels Birkmand (driving), Ingvar Jørgensen, and Erik Andersen (in back) are working to convert rapeseed oil into a fuel that can replace the diesel oil used to power this automobile.

Harnessing the wind is an old tradition. On Samsø, the first prominent landmark along the road leading from the harbor at Kolby Kås is a stout 19th-century windmill, an octagonal building with a shingled roof that tapers like a giant saltshaker to four crosshatched blades. A few miles away stands a far sleeker tower, only 25 years old but one of the first built in Denmark to generate electricity commercially. Wind power has since become one of the country’s biggest exports. Most of the wind turbines now sprouting in fields around the United States were made in Denmark by companies such as Vestas Wind Systems and NEG Micron.


Understandably, Samsø Energiselskab thought first of wind power. Engineers proposed dotting the island with 15 turbines, each capable of generating 750 kilowatts an hour, to meet all the native electricity needs. But Samsø is a small, rustic island—just four miles across at its widest point, and 16 miles from Nordby in the north to Brattingborg, the estate at the southern end governed by a stately mansion with fairy-tale turrets and ivy crawling up its brick facade. In between, there are no highways, just narrow, usually empty lanes that wander through villages and along barely perceptible hillocks and fields that encircle centuries-old farmhouses in stucco and half-timber. Nobody was surprised when some residents, led by Jytte Tønnesen, a grave digger at the church in the village of Onsbjerg, objected to the introduction of so many modern windmills to their pastoral island.

A computer-controlled hydraulic claw transports chips into the burner of the wood-fired heating plant near the village of Nordby. The plant is so automated that most of the time no workers are present.

Rapid advances in turbines assuaged some of the concerns. Samsø Energiselskab found it could install 11 newer, 1-megawatt machines to do more work than 15 of the old 750-kilowatt mills. Although they are visible across much of the island, the wind turbines do not really mar the landscape. They are nearly silent, unless you stand directly beneath them. They even have a kind of modernist beauty, their sleek, symmetrical ranks facing the breeze in unison, their rotors swooping down and rising in a mesmerizing cadence. 

Samsø Energiselskab also built support by giving locals an economic stake in the undertaking. Nine of the turbines are owned by farmers who tend the adjacent land. The remaining two are owned by a cooperative of 450 residents, who paid anywhere from $500 to $30,000 for their shares. Einar Mortensen, a big-jowled man with a thin mustache and short, unkempt hair, coordinated the investment. He produces an annual three-day summer music festival on the island, and he is passionate about holding on to local jobs. “We want to continue being a living island and a living society,” he says. “For each share, you get 500 kroner [about $80] a year. After six and a half years, you’ve been paid back.”

Part of the reason the numbers work so well is that the Danish government requires utilities to buy wind-generated electricity at a price that is normally above market rates. This effectively raises the total price of electricity across Denmark. (National taxes elevate the prices considerably more, however.) On the other hand, the money Samsø spends on electricity—about $5 million a year—now stays at home instead of being used to import energy from the larger neighboring islands.

The windmills started spinning in 2000 and generated enough electricity to meet all the island’s needs and send a surplus to the mainland. Nonetheless, in 2002, Samsø erected 10 more turbines, each more than twice as powerful as the originals, arrayed in a gentle arc two and a half miles off the island’s southern coast. The offshore wind farm, which went online early last year, helps the island fulfill its pledge to rely entirely on renewable energy. All of the electricity is exported to offset the 53 gigawatt-hours of energy Samsø uses for transportation. This is an accounting trick of sorts so the island generates as much energy from renewables as it consumes in nonrenewable diesel and gasoline.