Earth Equity News

The Island in the Wind. By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, July 7, 2008 issue. " [The Danish Island of] Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what's known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement... They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using... Samsø has eleven large land-based turbines... enough to meet all the island's demands for electricity... [Ten still larger] offshore turbines... were erected to compensate for Samsø's continuing use of fossil fuels in its cars, trucks, and ferries. Their combined output... provides the energy equivalent of all the gasoline and diesel oil consumed on the island, and then some; in aggregate, Samsø generates about ten per cent more power than it consumes... Around the same time that Samsø was designated Denmark's renewable-energy island, a group of Swiss scientists who were working on similar issues... asked themselves what level of energy use would be sustainable, not just for an island or a small European nation but for the entire world. The answer they came up with -- two thousand watts [20 100-watt bulbs burning 24/7] per person -- furnished the name for a new project: the 2,000 Watt Society... Most of the people in the world today consume far less than this. The average Bangladeshi, for example, uses... the equivalent of using roughly three hundred watts continuously... China [is] a fifteen-hundred-watt society... Those of us who live in the industrialized world, by contrast, consume far more than two thousand watts... Most Western European countries are six-thousand-watt societies; the United States and Canada run at twelve thousand watts. One of the founding principles of the 2,000-Watt Society is that this disparity is in itself unsustainable... Few parts of the U.S. may be as windy as Samsø, or as well organized as Switzerland, but just about everywhere there are possibilities for generating energy more inventively and using it more intelligently. Realizing these possibilities will require a great deal of effort. We may well decide not to make this effort. Such a choice to put off change, however, will merely drive us toward it."