Denmark Becomes First Country Powered Solely by Renewable Power (For 2 Days, Anyway)

[Tani Coyote]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand

 

In which Denmark continues to lead the way in economic development.

 

Thanks to strong winds, Denmark's wind farms were able to generate 116% of the country's energy needs on the 9th and 140% on the 10th. What's best? The farms weren't even operating at maximum capacity to accomplish this.

 

Denmark has a variety of power sources, but this is the first time the wind farms were able to meet all energy needs, and the first time on record a country's power needs were satisfied solely by renewables. But it looks like there's going to be more of a move towards wind power: Denmark has a considerable amount of investment going into more wind farms that will be even more efficient.

 

Needless to say this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for the various anti-renewable power brokers in countries like the United States and Britain.

[Lisbon]

It won't come to the US any time soon because we're a country operated exclusively by businesses at this point, pretty much. It'd hurt their income too much, regardless of all of the benefits it'd bring.

Anyway, good for them - I would like to say that I hope this would set a precedent for other countries as well to follow suit, but Denmark is about the size of Rhode Island so getting the whole country to operate solely on renewable resources would probably be significantly easier than say, Germany or France. If one of those larger European countries follows suit, then I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of other countries started it as well. Maybe I'm just underestimating the power of Denmark, though, and this practice will not only become a permanent thing there, but it'll spread to other countries of the world as well. Here's to hoping that this start a Domino effect.

[Sylvia Sylvain]

Denmark has been going strong for a while, now.