Bales of cornstalks and husks, by-products of the abundant local agriculture, are burned at a plant in Onsbjerg to heat the homes of nearby residents. Computer controls direct the bales into the furnace as needed. Two years ago, Samsø had one such plant. Due to the efforts of Lasse Lillevang (right) and other visionaries at Samsø Energiselskab, the island will soon have three, each doing its part to replace nonrenewable coal, gas, and oil.

After six years, Samsø has cut its gross energy consumption by one-fourth. By the energy office’s estimates, the island has also reduced nitrous oxide emissions by 41 percent, cut sulfuric oxide emissions by 71 percent, and eliminated more than its share of carbon dioxide emissions. This is, realistically, about as far as Samsø can go with current funding and technology. So Hermansen has become something of a green-energy proselytizer. He recently visited the United States and Japan and made the rounds in Brussels to build support for the European Union’s Energy Center and Energy Academy. The EU has initiated a campaign to identify 100 communities that could replicate the Samsø experiment, part of a campaign to produce 12 percent of Europe’s energy from renewable sources by 2010.

Ironically, the Danish government seems to be abandoning Samsø’s vision just as other countries are embracing it. Elections in 2001 brought to power a conservative government that has slashed most of the country’s funding and other incentives for renewable energy. The new government concluded that renewables cost too much. Samsø’s impressive gains, for instance, have cost Danish taxpayers about $4 million in direct aid (out of a total program cost of about $65 million).


Although improvements in wind and other renewables have required significant subsidies, the investments pale in comparison to the funds spent on more traditional energy sources. For example, the U.S. government has given the nuclear power industry about $145 billion in support over the last 50 years. Fossil fuel industries collect some $4 billion a year in tax breaks and other aid, reports Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group of nonpartisan budget watchdogs—and that figure doesn’t even take into account hidden forms of support, such as the Pentagon’s jet aircraft research and development that led to efficient new natural gas turbines. One version of the Republican energy bill rejected by Congress last year promised $37 billion to coal, oil, and nuclear power over the next 10 years, six times the proposed spending on renewables. Yet despite the relatively small tax credits given to producers, wind electricity is now often competitive with that supplied from fossil fuels in the United States, Lovins says. Other renewable energy sources likewise show steadily falling costs.

At the same time a growing number of state regulators and industry experts think America’s grid ought to be more decentralized—that it should look more like Samsø’s. Renewable energy, which is conducive to distributed, small-scale generation, could help here as well. The United States, like other developed nations, relies primarily on huge central power plants linked to each other on a national grid. Central power plants stopped seeing efficiency improvements about 30 years ago because of thermodynamic and production limitations, says Richard Hirsh, a technology historian at Virginia Tech who studies the country’s electric power systems. Moreover, massive, complex, interconnected power lines are vulnerable to sudden disruptions, as became starkly apparent last August, when a switching error in Ohio cut off electricity to 40 million people from Michigan and Ontario to Connecticut and Quebec. “A major cause of more and bigger blackouts,” says Lovins, “is building more and bigger power lines and plants.”

Samsø is small enough that its renewable energy project could succeed largely on the perseverance of a handful of dedicated people who had some institutional backing and the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. Building political consensus among 290 million Americans is a greater challenge, but bits of the Samsø philosophy are taking root in state legislatures. Already 37 states support net metering, which allows utility customers who produce their own electricity to sell it back to the grid. Unlike the federal government, which funnels wind-energy tax credits principally to large utilities, Minnesota fosters small-scale investment in wind with direct payments to small producers. In 2003 the state added 228 megawatts of wind power, more than 35 percent of which comes from small local owners. With a total of 563 megawatts of wind generation, Minnesota is now the third largest wind-energy state, after California and Texas.

Grand proposals to wean the United States from fossil fuels have long come across as absurdly romantic or hopelessly impractical. If we want to transform our patterns of energy supply and demand, perhaps we would do better to proceed as Denmark has—one island at a time.

CAN GREEN POWER MAKE IT IN THE U.S.?

The United States is far from embracing a Samsø-style commitment to decentralized green energy. Last year the Senate passed legislation mandating a 10 percent standard, but the House opposed the plan and Senate Republicans agreed to keep it out of the energy bill this year.

When the purse strings do open, they tend to support projects with well-defined constituencies: farmers whose corn can be distilled into ethanol to mix with gasoline, for instance. The wind-energy tax credit, which has led to a sharp increase in wind-generated electricity, benefits mostly companies that earn income from other sources. New wind farms therefore reinforce the current distribution pattern of central power plants linked together on a national grid.

At the same time, private companies are exploring more innovative options, such as anaerobic digesters, which convert animal manure into methane that can run a generator. Microgy of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, has licensed Danish digester technology and, without subsidies, started building plants on five Wisconsin dairies. The farms have between 800 and 1,200 cows, each fueling a 775-kilowatt generator. The company’s chairman, Joe Cresci, plans to generate 25 megawatts in Wisconsin and has an agreement to develop 15 megawatts for Vermont.

—R. M.

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