Indians from the North

When I was moving to Denmark one of my acquaintances called the Danes "Indians from the north". I don't even remember any more what did he mean exactly but I it kinda stuck in my mind. And in part, at least if you focus on environmental issues Danes do appear that they are trying hard to do what is in their powers to protect it.

Windmills

One of the strongest wind mills producing company in the world is Danish, Vestas and they are building new windmills all over Denmark and other countries in the world. On a windy day I would be willing to bet that Denmark is exporting the electricity produced from their windmills. They are paying for their windmill energy push through heavy taxation of car imports and since Denmark doesn't have any car manufacturing industry all of their cars are imported.

When buying a car Danes are paying 200-250% of the price of the car, depending on the car model. Heavy taxation of led to one funny consequence. Danes are buying mini cars a lot since they will have reasonable prices despite the heavy taxation, they are cheap to maintain and very economical to run. They are still mini though and there is a lot of overweight and obese people in Denmark. Now, imagine when 5 people of 100+ kilos start coming out of the mini car.... you wonder how did they fit in there.

They also have very high standards of insulation that newly built houses need to have. Consequence of that was that in the last couple of decades even though productivity went up their electricity consumption stayed the same. That is how much more efficient at energy saving they became. I even heard some Danes complaining about EU standard for isolation. They say that their own standards were so high that forcing the EU standard was almost pointless.

Windmill at the coast of the North Sea

When it comes to heating, Danes are also very efficient. From what I can tell most buildings and houses are connected to district heating power plants. Benefit of this is that a lot less energy is being used for heating when you do it that way, then when every house, apartment needs to take care of their own heating and most of their heating is coming from burning waste. I do not think I need to mention that they are doing it in accordance to the highest standards and that those plants have but load of filters installed so they keep pollution to the minimum.

Danes started with the transition to clean energy in the 70ties not because they were worried about the planet but because of the oil crisis. When oil crisis hit the world in the 70ties Denmark was hit hard. That event made them realize just how depended they are on foreign oil and natural gas. As a consequence of that event they started thinking how to reduce their dependency on foreign gas and oil and the response they figured out was windmills. They are a country almost completely surrounded by sea on a low altitude which means that it is constantly windy and on the other hand their sky is covered in clouds 7 months a year and they have no running water, so wind looked like a way to go but it needed financing.

To finance their green energy push they increased taxes on car imports and Denmark has no car manufacturing industry, so all of their cars are imported. Because of that Danes are paying 200 to 250% of the car price on purchase and all that money is going into wind mills and because of that today Denmark produces 30% of its energy from renewable sources and they target 100% of energy production from renewable sources by 2050.

So from the perspective of energy production they went very far in renewables and also they went very far at reducing their energy consumption in general. But being concerned with the environment, energy production is just one part of the equation and consumption is the second one and on that one they do not fair so good but that is a topic for another time.