Energi Akademiet havde den ære, at have en international praktikant i nogle uger i sommeren 2024. Oliver Chancellor er en amerikansk high school student, bosat i staten California. Efter sit ophold har han skrevet en artikel, hvor han reflekterer over de ligheder og forskelle der er mellem Samsø og Californien når det kommer til vedvarende energi og klima bevidsthed. Vi er glade for at kunne dele Olivers artikel med jer. 

What California Can Learn From Samsø’s Sustainability Success

Article by Oliver Chancellor

My name is Oliver Chancellor, and I am a rising senior in high school from Palo Alto, California. I have had the pleasure of interning at the Danish island of Samsø’s Energy Academy, where I have learned quite a lot about the world of sustainability, especially the energy production, efficiency, and management aspects. I have found that there are many similarities as well as differences in the sustainability practices in Samsø and California. For example, California and Samsø both have a big focus on transitioning to renewable energy sources to replace non-renewable energy sources. Although California is one of the leading states in the US in terms of sustainability, it still has a long way to go. So far, Samsø has been more successful in achieving its sustainability goals than California, partly due to the large difference in the scale of both locations and their settings. California has over 39 million residents living in a diverse range of settings, while Samsø has a population of just under 3,700 and consists of mainly rural settings. The small population size of Samsø has many benefits when it comes to sustainability: with a smaller population, Samsø holds a tight-knit community, which makes it easier to align on a shared vision for the future, foster a collective sense of responsibility and commitment to sustainability goals, and allows for more effective communication and outreach. The Energy Academy can directly interact with a significant portion of the residents, ensuring widespread awareness and participation in sustainability initiatives. All of these factors lead to productive collective action being taken towards sustainability. This is much harder to achieve in California as its massive population makes it very difficult for any united effort to be made or for a collective plan to be widely adopted, especially with its increasingly polarized political scene that seems to never align on any issue. 

Today, Samsø stands as a prime example of how successful communities can be if they work together to achieve sustainability, but it hasn’t always been like this. Even though Samsø won a national competition and was selected by the Danish government as proof of concept for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the community of Samsø still needed convincing on why they should participate and how it would benefit them. This is where Søren Hermansen, the Director of the Samsø Energy Academy, who is also a “Nobel”, came in. Søren was able to inspire and persuade residents to invest in wind turbines on their own land, including milk cow farmer Jorgen Tranberg, who, after finding success in the on-shore wind turbine, took a step further and became a part owner in one of the off-shore wind turbines. The success that residents like Mr. Tranberg found in the Wind Turbines motivated other residents to participate as well, eventually leading all 11 on-shore wind turbines on Samsø to be owned by local residents. Due to the community’s effort and participation, Samsø’s electricity production through wind turbines is more than three times greater than its electricity consumption, allowing Samsø to send excess electricity to the mainland of Denmark. 

This local ownership and personal investments that Samsø residents have in the sustainability projects and practices here on Samsø significantly differentiate Samsø from California. For instance, there are thousands of off-shore and on-shore wind turbines throughout California, but almost none of the wind turbines are owned by citizens but rather by large agencies and corporations. Californians’ lack of ownership in renewable energy contributes to their lack of engagement with sustainability efforts. From personal experience, I can confidently say that Californians do not feel as much of an individual responsibility to take care of the environment and live sustainably because everything is consumed and produced on such a large scale that they cannot see or feel the impact of their personal actions. This is one of many factors that have allowed Samsø to become as successful as it has in achieving sustainability and has unfortunately held California back. I have found that my hometown of Palo Alto (with 68,000 residents) and Samsø use several of the same methods to reduce their carbon footprint and consume electricity more efficiently. They both utilize geothermal energy, essentially the heat our earth produces, to heat and cool homes, reducing the amount of electricity required. The vast majority of the electricity that Samsø consumes is produced by wind turbines, while wind only provides electricity for about 4% of Palo Alto’s consumption. Both communities have a high percentage of residents who have solar panels installed on their houses. The difference is that the electricity produced by the solar panels on Samsø’s residential houses is sent to the grid that supports Northern Europe, while Palo Alto allows their residents to use the electricity to power their homes directly. For example, my family in Palo Alto uses our solar panels to charge our electric cars and to heat our water. Solar energy accounts for about one-fifth of Palo Alto’s electricity and about one-twentieth of Samsø’s. Biomass, in the form of locally produced straw, is used in Samsø’s district heating plants to produce heat distributed to their various buildings. In contrast, biomass is used in Palo Alto to create electricity, which accounts for about 7% of its electricity usage. Palo Alto gets over one-third of their electricity from hydroelectric dams, which Samsø does not utilize. Through these various sources of electricity, Palo Alto provides all of its residents with electricity that is guaranteed to be carbon-neutral. Samsø generates over 100% of the electricity it consumes, which significantly differs from Palo Alto as it receives most of its electricity from outside of California.

Samsø is known worldwide for being the world’s largest carbon-neutral & energy-positive society, and the Energy Academy receives thousands of visitors a year from people looking for inspiration & practical ideas to help their communities become more like Samsø. According to Søren, a “Green Hero of the environment” (per Time Magazine) and recipient of the Swedish Gothenburg Award (unofficially known as the environmental “Nobel Prize”), the key to a self-sufficient community is a socially engaged process where the locals are involved and feel a sense of ownership of the process and outcome. 

The Samsø sense of unity and communal pride in being self-sustainable and climate-conscious is inspirational and generates results. It is this collaborative attitude that will accelerate the change we need and is in large part the reason that 6000 hopeful visitors travel to this little island from all over the world every year, with the hope of somehow bottling and bringing home a little green Samsø magic. Thank you to Søren and the rest of the team at the Academy for sharing a bit of their magic with me. The inspiring road map that Samsø and the Energy Academy’s accomplishments provide, and the massive attention it’s getting, gives me hope and confirms my interest in focusing on sustainability and environmental science in college. We only have this one planet, and we all need to unite and rally behind it because we are running out of time.