Cycling city Copenhagen sprints to become first carbon-neutral capital
COPENHAGEN: Around the world, more than 70 major cities have pledged to end their reliance on fossil fuels and stop pumping out climate-changing emissions by 2050.
But Copenhagen – a city of wind turbines, bicycles and reliable public transportation – thinks it can go even further: It intends to accomplish that shift in just seven years.
It will require a complete reimagining of how the Danish capital is powered and designed – and a lot of cyclists, officials admit.
“Why are we going for that? People might say what we do in Copenhagen doesn’t really matter on the global stage at all. We are tiny,” said Jørgen Abildgaard, director of the city’s climate programme.
But with cities and countries around the world still searching for ways to turn the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change into a reality, “it’s important to show that it’s possible to make this transition” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Scandinavian cities have long been seen as green leaders – and Copenhagen is no exception.
While other cities have parking garages for cars, Copenhagen has them for bicycles.
Virtually all its 600,000 residents own a bicycle, and the city has 375 kilometres of dedicated cycle lanes.
The harbour- rim med municipality also is mostly powered by clean energy – and it has its own renewable energy company and wind turbines.
Running its own energy systems is one of the reasons Copenhagen is already well on track to being carbon neutral – meaning it will produce no more carbon emissions than it can offset elsewhere – by 2025.
The city’s concerted efforts to go green put it firmly ahead of the schedule set by almost 200 nations in Paris to effectively phase out greenhouse gases between 2050 and 2100.
Leading climate scientists will warn next week that global carbon emissions from energy use will have to plunge by up to seven per cent a year to meet Paris’ toughest goals – unless technologies to suck carbon from the air and store it are developed, according to a draft UN report obtained by Reuters.
Copenhagen’s officials are confident the city can largely achieve its ambitious goals.
“We want to be 100 per cent (carbon neutral by 2025). But if we are 95 per cent or around that, it’s still a big success,” said Abildgaard, who has overseen the city’s efforts toward carbon neutrality ever since it made its pledge in 2009, when it hosted UN climate talks.
In 2017, Copenhagen produced about 1.37 million tonnes of climate-changing gases, down 40 per cent from 2005, according to city figures.
That’s about 2.2 tonnes of emissions per capita, one of the lowest rates for a European city.
The city said the reduction in emissions was largely due to a switch to wind energy under HOFOR, the city’s own utility company.
“We are some of the muscle that the city has to be able to (use to) reach its goals,” said Jörgen Edström, head of strategy and business development at HOFOR, one of many energy companies in the city.
“The city wanted to build windmills to compensate for its electricity consumption – so we built windmills. They have a company to do the things they want to do,” he said.
HOFOR has invested billions of euros to build 360 wind turbines by 2025 to power most of the city, and will soon replace its coal-fired power plants with biomass-powered units that burn sustainable wood pellets, the company says.
Around the world, cities consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for about three-quarters of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the United Nations.
That means finding ways for cities to become carbon neutral will be key to meeting the Paris commitment to keep the rise in global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“Cities are where the emissions are the largest. So if cities can solve the problems, then that’s part of the way to a more carbon neutral world,” Edström said.
In its quest to cut emissions, Copenhagen has another distinct advantage: For over 100 years, the city – and Denmark as a whole – has relied on district heating, a system where heat is produced and supplied from one neighbourhood or area plant, instead of per household.
That means the city itself can make the switch to cleaner energy for large numbers of residents, cutting carbon emissions by over half compared to the use of individual gas or oil boilers, HOFOR says.
The city also has a newly-built district cooling system, which uses seawater to cool buildings and households, cutting energy consumption up to 80 per cent compared to traditional methods of air-conditioning, HOFOR said.
By 2025, the city aims to be powered entirely by wind, sun, geothermal energy, waste, and wood and other biomass.
Yet despite its huge investment in new, clean technologies, one of the city’s big priorities is cutting prices for energy users.
“The municipality didn’t say, ‘Spend all the money to achieve the carbon-neutral agenda.’ They said, ‘We want lower prices and we want carbon neutrality’,” Edström said.
That aim looks to be within reach. A couple living in a flat will save an average of 4,000 Danish krones (537 euros) each year on energy consumption if the city reaches its climate goals, the city says.