Yesterday (Saturday) I had the opportunity to go on a day long trip to Lolland, an area in the southeast of Denmark. Lolland's economy is based mostly on agriculture and is Denmark's poorest region. It was somewhat surprising, therefore, to learn that Lolland is also doing more than perhaps any other part of Denmark to make itself a bastion of sustainability.
We visited a small school whose parking lot featured a shipping container holding the world's most advanced hydrogen fuel cell technology. The container, in reality a demonstration facility, used wind energy from turbines located across Lolland to create pure hydrogen by means of electrolysis. This hydrogen is in effect an efficient way to store energy; always a problem as wind power is plentiful but intermittent. The hydrogen is pumped to a test area of around 40 homes where it is converted by fuel cells into energy for heating and electricity.
What most impressed me about Lolland was not the high tech fuel cells, however. It wasn't the presence of the 400+ wind turbines, including the world's original offshore field. It wasn't even the pilot project in conjunction with NASA to grow offshore algae among the turbines, the most efficient substance for producing biofuels known to man. The most impressive thing was that a small, resource-and-knowledge-poor area had decided that it was going to succeed by embracing sustainable development wholeheartedly. Twenty-five years ago, when the last shipyard closed, the unemployment rate on Lolland was over 20 percent. Today it is 4 percent, less even than Copenhagen's. In the United States these days, it often seems to me that we have lost our drive to seek bold, innovative solutions to our problems. For a variety of reasons, such proposals are dismissed as unfeasible pipe dreams. The next time I hear such naysaying, I will know it to be a fallacy. I will think of Lolland.
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