This example shows how important it is to create local “ownership” and some incentives be it financially or morally to get a positive development going. I have written about the “Samsø” experience before but always felt that it was important that Jordanians could hear directly from the people involved in making a small local community independent from fossil fuels. My collaborators at the embassy succeed in securing one of the key persons Jesper Kjems from Samsø to appear at the first Euro-Jordanian renewable energy conference that opened yesterday in Amman. For those that did not have the possibility to attend I reproduce an interview on the Samsø experience from Jordan Times today.
But back to my point. In Jordan we need successful showcases in order to advance the use of renewable energy and lessen the near total dependence on imported energy. I am sure that we have communities in Jordan that are interested and capable of pushing things forward – but the government and parliament needs to create the right positive conditions for such a development – one of those being the adoption of a good progressive renewable energy law. And while we wait for that we can hope that the first commercial wind power plant in Al Khamsah will get off to a good start and show potential investors that renewable energy means business – also in Jordan.
AMMAN – Jordan has much to learn from a small farming community in northern Denmark, according to energy experts.
At first glance, the Kingdom, mostly desert, has little in common with the island of Samso, an agricultural area home to 4,000.
But villages and towns across the country have much to learn from a community, which, in less than a decade, became the world’s first complete renewable energy city through local community involvement.
In 1998, the town embarked on an experiment to become 100 per cent renewable in 10 years under a Danish government initiative, with no grants, funds or assistance from the government or outside institutions.
Armed with only a renewable energy-friendly investment environment, Samso organised focused local community involvement to build the foundations for a clean-energy future.
A traditional and conservative farming community entirely dependent on oil and coal shipped from the mainland, few thought Samso could fulfil the goal – let alone in 10 years time, according to Jesper Kjems of the Samso Energy Academy.
Project officials met with local residents and highlighted the initiative not as a chance to save the environment, but as a business opportunity to breathe life into the island, which had suffered a mini-depression after the closure of a slaughterhouse vital to its economy.
Under national economic incentives, Samso entrepreneurs were provided with a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity generated by wind turbines, with insurance in case of technical failures, assuring local banks providing financing that the turbines were indeed a safe investment.
Dozens of farmers pooled together and purchased the turbines, which many found to be more profitable than the farms they had tended to their entire lives.
“In areas where private companies just throw up wind turbines, residents see them as obtrusive. But when people actually own and benefit from them, they don’t mind seeing a turbine in their backyard,” Kjems noted.
To further local ownership, wind turbines were also open to public investment through local cooperatives, allowing Samso’s private citizens to own shares in turbines and profit from the export of energy back to mainland.
Around 450 citizens, some 10 per cent of the population, bought shares in wind power plants, and the 10 one-megawatt (MW) turbines soon accounted for 100 per cent of the island’s electricity needs.
“It became locally owned. Even if one resident didn’t own a share in the wind energy, their neighbour did, their wife did. It changed the way the community looked at the entire project,” he noted.
For heating, Samso residents turned to biomass and solar energy, burning of local straw and utilising some 2,500 solar panels to heat water which is then transferred to their homes.
Owned and operated by local companies, heating districts run by elected councils of area residents, and consumer-owned heating systems, the biomass/solar heaters now account for 77 per cent of the island’s heating needs.
The largest obstacle to creating a completely carbon-neutral community, according to Kjems, however, was transportation.
“For electric cars the technology was so far off. It just wasn’t realistic,” he said.
To offset the fossil fuels used by the transportation sector, the island established ten 2.3MW offshore wind turbines in the North Sea, generating and exporting more clean energy than was consumed by cars, buses or ferries to and from the mainland.
The island has since become a leading energy destination, attracting journalists and foreign dignities from far and wide to learn from their accomplishments.
Kjems noted that officials from Egypt doubted such an initiative could be replicated on a larger scale, as the population of Samso is equivalent to just two city blocks in Cairo.
For him, the answer is simple.
“Make two city blocks 100 per cent renewable, then maybe the next two blocks will follow. You have to start somewhere local, and let everyone learn for themselves the benefits and cross over,” he noted.
Such an approach would work well in Jordan, either at the regional or municipal level, he said.
Officials in Jordan could utilise tribal or family structures to identify community leaders to support the initiative, and promote the financial incentives in the sector to local farmers and landowners.
Noting that the technology used by Samso is imported from mainland Denmark or overseas, Kjemp stressed that Jordan does not need to produce renewable energy technology to benefit. Local application of the technology and investment alone can create jobs and reduce the country’s energy bill, he added.
“The model would have to be modified for Jordan to utilise vast resources of sunshine. But it can be done in any village or any city here,” he noted, stressing that making the switch to renewable energies is in peoples’ interests is key to success.
“Not many people care about saving the polar bears. But if you tell people that renewable energy will save Jordan, will save this village, they will begin to act,” he said.
Posted by Thomas Lund-Sørensen 
Posted by Thomas Lund-Sørensen 
Posted by Thomas Lund-Sørensen 
