Dedicated to green living

The Danish island of Samso looks an unlikely place for a revolution. Yet this windswept scrap of Scandinavia has recently undergone a remarkable change. Today it exports millions of kilowatt hours of electricity to mainland Denmark while its carbon footprint has been cut by a staggering 140% since 1997. Dozens of wind turbines dot the landscape, houses have solar-panelled roofs, and a line of giant turbines off its southern coast swirl in the wind. Towns are linked to district heating systems which pump hot water to homes, powered by solar panels or by generators which burn straw or timber chips.

Samso once generated an annual 45,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide – about 11 tonnes a head – but by scrapping its old fossil-fuel generators and building renewable power plants, that figure has been cut to -15,000 tonnes. (The minus figure arises because Samsingers export their excess energy.)

Yet none of the enterprises which achieved these changes were imposed by outsiders or energy companies. Each is owned either by a local collective or by an individual islander, a striking social transformation that began in 1997 when the Danish government selected the island to be the site of a national energy experiment. Søren Harmensen, a former teacher, was picked to run it and to encourage islanders to cut their carbon habits. Slowly, the idea took hold and the first projects were launched; a couple of turbines on the west coast and a district heating plant. "Nothing was achieved without talk and a great deal of community involvement," he says.

There has been a price, of course: about £40m, which has been invested by the Danish government, the EU, local businessmen and individual members of collectives. That works out at £10,000 for every islander, which works out – if you multiply that sum by 60m, the UK population – at £600bn as the cost of bringing a similar revolution to Britain and £12000 billion billion to India.

"This is a pilot project to show the world what can be done," insists Harmensen. "We have shown that if you want to change how we generate energy, you have to start at the community level and not impose technology on people." And that is the real lesson from Samso. What has happened here is a social not a technological revolution. "We are not hippies," says Harmensen. "We just want to change how we use our energy without harming the planet or without giving up the good life."