Soren Hermansen can be credited as the person who helped the world’s first 100% renewable island and who lives in a country that gets 50% of its electricity from wind and other renewable sources.
Hermansen said that Denmark has a powerful grid and they don’t experience any power failures. In fact, Denmark has managed to successfully integrate its renewables into its electricity system, but also avoided some of the problems that Australia is experiencing by burying its power distribution lines underground. By doing this, it helped avoid blackouts caused by severe weather.
While underground power distribution and cabling would be very expensive to implement in Australia and taking out the storm factor, it showed the Denmark’s system was possible to successfully integrate renewable energy into the electricity network and produce a stable system without relying on coal-fired power plants.
Debates raged in Australia about the country’s needs for coal-fired power to provide a stable electricity system specifics of the number of blackouts in South Australia, which gets about 40% of its electricity from renewable.
According to Hermansen, Samso, an island in Denmark, where renewables provide 100% of the electricity supply, is stable. And most of the time, the island exports electricity to the mainland. 5 of the 10 offshore wind turbines are owned by the local government, the other 3 are privately-owned by local farmers who contributed money to fund the project and the last 2 are owned by a co-operative of small investors.
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