Monday 22 September 2008

Samso

I read an interesting article over the weekend (which was warm enough that one could read the paper in the garden in a deck-chair!). It's about an island in Denmark that has become completely carbon-neutral. In fact, it sells excess power back to the mainland. There are some beautiful photos too. [link]

2 comments:

Lemm said...

Interesting, though 4124 inhabitants and 10 windmills not to mention the solar panels etc... Imagine a park of 18,000 500kW windmills to cover a city like London. The costs of a windmill is about 1000 dollar a kWatt, so about 9 billion dollar. One kWh electricity costs with ordinary fossil fuel resources about 10 dollar cent, so 9 billion dollar is 90 billion kWh which is enough to give whole London one year of electricity.

Gavin Bierman said...

Yeah - the figures are depressing. At least for the moment, anyhow. [Although we're living in the moment when governments are willing to pony up $700billion to help out the financial sector...]

What I liked most (apart from the photos) was the community spirit that this effort had produced. That seemed impressive and worth investigating, as much as the particular energy-collecting strategies they were using.