Earth
Summary
In a city built on islands and inlets, the wind off the Øresund smells faintly of salt and cycling grease. Copenhagen’s answer to climate change is not a single icon so much as a choreography: heat the homes with shared pipes, cool the business core with seawater, turn rainstorms into parks, and turn trash into watts—then capture the carbon on the way out. The system hums in buried mains and pump rooms, but its logic is legible on the street.
Cooling with the harbor, heating with the city
Copenhagen’s near-universal district heating (about 98% coverage) is the quiet backbone: hot water flows from CHP plants, waste-to-energy, and large heat pumps to radiators across the metro. In summer, a parallel network does the opposite—district cooling uses free cooling from seawater plus efficient chillers, letting offices ditch rooftop compressors. The utility HOFOR now delivers more than 100 MW of district cooling; studies and field results show large electricity and CO₂ savings versus building-by-building chillers.
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