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How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed their World
Written and illustrated by Allan Drummond
Frances Foster Books, 2011
$16.99, ages 6-10, 40 pages
A Danish island where hats are always flying off heads learns to harness the energy of the wind and takes itself off the grid.
In this remarkable true story, Drummond tells about the people of Samso who used the very thing they couldn't escape from -- buffeting winds -- to work for them.
In 1997, Denmark's government designated the island as its "renewable energy island" -- a region that could eventually run completely on free, nonpolluting energy thanks in a large part to its windy location.
Since then, the island off the coast of Denmark has become almost entirely energy independent through the use of wind turbines, as well as district heating plants, biomass and solar panels.
It's even able to export surplus electricity from those turbines to the mainland and it has eliminated its carbon emissions by 140 percent.
That means if you were to look for a carbon footprint there, you wouldn't find one.
But becoming a green island was quick and it wasn't easy.
This is a story about ordinary people who, at first, weren't so sure they wanted to fuss with clean energy.
They didn't think about where their energy came from and they weren't very motivated to conserve it:
They switched on lots of lights, turned up heaters too much, used hot water without thinking, and expected oil to arrive by tanker ships or trucks and their electricity through cables.
Sound familiar? That's partly what makes this story remarkable -- they were people very much like everyone else.
Then one day, the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy planted the idea that Samso could be more than a fossil fuel consumer.