CommonWealth Beacon
Summary
How can societies decarbonize, and find ways to fund it, including private investment? Denmark offers useful lessons.
I recently had the privilege of joining a US delegation to Denmark, where I had the opportunity to interact with individuals and organizations across the energy spectrum, from industry and government leaders to trade associations and groups like State of Green, a public-private partnership that promotes Danish leadership in the sector.
Denmark’s famed district energy system taps into industrial waste heat as a source of energy: paying users to capture heat that would have otherwise been distributed in the atmosphere. The “system boundaries” they draw are more holistic, too. In the US, at best, we draw those boundaries at a facility’s property lines.The other part of their re-source strategy is to meet heating needs using their district heating systems. These systems have multiple sources of energy: industrial waste heat, geothermal, biogas, and, yes, even fossil fuels to stabilize the system. Investments in the district energy system are driven at a municipal level, with each municipality or community choosing to expand the system and bringing residents on to it.
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