Going carbon neutral - lessons from Denmark
The Baltic Sea island of Bornholm wants to be carbon zero by 2025. Can it do it?
Bornholm – a Danish Island in the Baltic Sea – is trying to go carbon neutral by 2025. It’s a lofty ambition, and one islanders say no-one else has achieved before. This dream has been 20 years in the making; a crash in fish stocks that Bornholmers were so dependent on meant they had to reinvent themselves and they chose to become ‘the bright green island’. Since then, they’ve been making biogas from manure, building wind turbine after wind turbine, and now they're piloting new ways of storing this renewable energy, including in a battery made of salt. The Bornholmers hope they will soon have enough renewable energy to begin supplying energy to mainland Denmark as well Germany. But the change hasn’t just been at the top level; the 40,000 islanders have been encouraged to electrify their homes, and businesses, as much as possible. We hear from a brewery whose production has gone carbon neutral by capturing carbon to create the bubbles in its beers, and from a Michelin star chef who’s set up a restaurant using locally sourced food.
