Copenhagen to send 10mn kroner to Bornholm to promote energy jobs
The Danish government plans to earmark 10mn kroner (€1.34mn) to allay concerns on the island of Bornholm that a planned 3GW interconnector will not benefit the local economy.
The proposed funding is included in a proposed national rural-development plan unveiled today.
Slated for completion in 2030, Energy Island Bornholm will consist of a 3GW windfarm off the southern coast of Bornholm and two on-shore interconnectors that will link the windfarm with Germany and the Greater Copenhagen area.
Despite local support for the windfarm, there has been concern about the placement of the interconnectors, which will occupy 100 hectares along the coast of the popular holiday destination, as well as the likelihood that none of the power generated by the windfarm will be available to the island’s residents or firms.
The Bornholm island council hopes that a proposed business park adjacent to the interconnector station could be powered by the windfarm, making it a selling point that could lead to the creation of new jobs. Søren Møller Christensen, the director of Baltic Energy Island, an Ørsted Wind Power-funded group seeking to promote energy innovation on Bornholm, reckons that the funding could be used to pay for the business park.
“If we’re giving up land for Energy Island Bornholm, then Bornholm needs to get something back that secures Bornholm’s economy in the long run. And this is something we can do with this money,” Mr Christensen told TV2/Bornholm, a local news outlet.
Copenhagen has earmarked half of the expected 31.5bn kroner the project is expected to cost.
For someone from Denmark, the idea of accessing digital services or personal documents on-line is rather old-fashioned. The country is on version 2.0 of its national eID, and some 97% of residents over 15 use it to access all manner of public services. The private sector can also be partly thanked for the uptake: many firms have adopted the system as the login for their services as well.
Denmark stands out when it comes to eID, but it is not alone. All of the countries of the NB8, the club of eight Nordic and Baltic countries, can be found near the top the UN’s rankings of public services available on-line. Facilitating this requires giving residents reliable ways of verifying themselves—and forcing them to use it. The latter is an irritation in the start, but familiarity, as the Danish case shows, breeds content.
That should make the next goal something of a tip-in: this week, the countries’ digitalisation ministers agreed to pool their experience in order to be among the first EU members to roll out an eID that can be used in the entire bloc.
Brussels has stipulated that, by the end of next year, all members must offer at least one form of eID. Being a first-mover, the thinking amongst the NB8 goes, will allow the countries’ software developers to stay ahead of the pack, making their systems attractive to countries that will not have an eID solution of their own ready by the deadline. When it comes to identification technology, the biggest selling point may be reputation.
The concept of a maritime pilot is simple: a local mariner boards a vessel that is sailing unfamiliar waters and steers it safely through. Two projects being run by Danpilot, the Danish state pilot agency, may redefine key aspects of that job description.
In the first, begun last month, drones are being used to assist pilots operating on the water in the Port of Rønne, sending live aerial video to give pilots a top-down view when steering ships. Rønne serves as the staging point for several windfarms being built in the Baltic, and it is just this type of bulky traffic requiring complex manoeuvring the drones are well-suited to help with.
VesCo, the DanPilot-owned firm that is conducting the project, is hoping it will result in a system in which drones can automatically follow vessels to improve situational awareness, cutting risk during heavy-lift calls and reducing turn-around time.
A separate project, being run together with Danelec, a maritime-safety firm, may take this idea a step further by keeping the pilot on land entirely and instead navigating using the video beamed down by drones.
Trials in Esbjerg, on Denmark’s North Sea coast, suggest that using drones in this way makes piloting safer and faster. For local firms, the test flights are an opportunity to push their expertise in robotics and autonomy. Pilots, meanwhile, will be finding themselves in unfamiliar job territory
Asset managers with Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest financial institution, may now place investors’ money in nearly all European firms working in the defence industry, after it removed 30 firms from its blacklist earlier this month, leaving only producers of the most controversial weapons out of bounds.
The decision comes amidst growing European concerns about whether it can protect itself from a Russian attack, should America not live up to its commitment as a member of Nato. It also comes as European countries, looking to build up their defences after years of neglect, are now making it easy for their militaries to spend—and giving them plenty of money to do so. Denmark, for example, is expected to increase its defence spending from the current 2% of GDP to perhaps 5% in the coming years. Meanwhile the European Commission in March said it was making €800 billion available for defence spending.
For investors, such measures provide moral backing to the interest they had already begun showing the defence industry. After years of favouring funds that made a virtue of shunning arms, investors, according to Danske Bank, have more than doubled the amount of money going into defence-related firms over the past two years.
Despite its about face, Danske Bank is keeping its restrictions on controversial weapons banned by international conventions, including cluster bombs, anti-personnel mines and biological and chemical weapons. Similarly, it says it will continue to offer investment options for those who prefer their capitalism with a streak of pacifism. All’s fair in investment and in war.
The home guard on Bornholm this week sent out letters to 250 of its former members, asking them to consider rejoining the volunteer force, which currently numbers 300. It is a mission that will not be hard to complete: concerns about Moscow’s next move after Ukraine has led to a surge in the number of home-guard members nationwide. Last year, the number of new volunteers increased 35% from the previous year, the most in over four decades.
More military spending will also help. Copenhagen has vastly increased its defence budget in recent years. Only a fraction of this will go to the home guard, but the money will be used directly on the types of things that matter most to soldiers: guns, body armour and sleeping bags.
For islanders, the big motivator is geography. Being far removed from Denmark proper and having been left to fend for itself in the past has left its mark on islanders, and their home guard unit can operate with a greater degree of autonomy than units elsewhere in Denmark. Some residents and military experts want the military to take it a step further and reactivate Bornholms Værn, a volunteer militia that had existed for 400 years until it was disbanded in 2000.
Prior to Russian invasion of Ukraine, the home guard was mostly tasked with helping civil authorities and the police. Today, support for the regular army is increasingly being added to those duties, and the local commander expects more missions of that sort in the years to come. To keep up, he must keep the home guard returning.
Covering some 8 million hectares, forested areas in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania make up about half of the three countries’ land area in total. That is comparatively less than in Sweden, where its 28 million hectares account for more than two thirds of its land. Nevertheless, the Swedish forestry industry imports up to 40% of its timber from the Baltics.
Part of Swedish firms’ interest in Baltic forests stems from their productivity and their makeup. Latvia, for example, stands out for its high proportion of deciduous trees, such as birch, particularly compared with Sweden, where pine dominates. Baltic forests have something else going for them, too: they are expanding; in the past century, their area has increased by more than half.
In spite of that, the price of Baltic forestland has gone up. In 2000, a hectare of went for €500. Today, it gets €3,700. Much of the increase has been fuelled by Swedish forest companies buying up land. But, should their interest weaken (in January, Södra Skogsägarna, a Swedish firm that is the largest forest owner in the three Baltic countries, announced plans to divest its Baltic holdings), it need not result in a fall in prices.
Danske Bank, a Danish financial institution whose Swedish subsidiary follows the forestry industry, reckons that, unlike in Sweden and Finland, the price of Baltic forestland does not yet take into account factors like its potential for carbon sequestration, its suitability for solar arrays or wind turbines, or its recreational value. All of those could support further price increases, it concludes, even if the Swedes stop seeing Baltic forests solely for their trees.
An experiment in Rønne, on Bornholm, that has seen three streetlights doubling as charging points for electric cars since last May is being wound down after demonstrating its potential.
To date, there have been over 500 charging sessions. That, according to Beof, the island’s power company, is enough for it to conclude that the idea of integrating charging points into urban infrastructure is viable.
Beof and Spirii, which installs and runs charging kit, have been running the year-long project with the permission of the island council. Its members must now decide whether to make charging points a permanent fixture on street lights. Beof’s advice is that they should, since it would make it easy to build-out a charging network, without having to add new infrastructure to an often-cluttered cityscape.
For councils elsewhere considering something similar, the use rate is a good argument in favour of proceeding, but Beof underscores the need for clear guidelines and healthy portion of foresight. Without them, the idea is likely to short-circuit.
German customs authorities have confiscated the Eventin, a tanker linked to the Kremlin’s “shadow fleet”, along with its cargo of approximately 100,000 tons of crude oil. The ship was impounded in January and its seizure comes after the EU placed it on its sanctions list.
The seizure is a notable escalation in the enforcement of sanctions against Moscow’s attempts to get around restrictions on its oil trade. The “shadow fleet” of vessels flying flags other than the Russian is used to transport oil. It emerged shortly after Moscow’s unprovoked 2022 attack on Ukraine in response to Western sanctions against the Russian oil industry.
Recently the fleet’s role in wreaking havoc on subsea infrastructure has been getting a lot of attention. Environmentalists, for their part, fret that the ships are an oil spill waiting to happen; they are old, poorly kept and lack proper insurance. The Eventin was found floating adrift in January off the island of Rügen.
Germany’s seizure sends a message to Moscow and its cronies who help it to bypass sanctions. But Berlin must now carefully consider its next move: the confiscation order means that the vessel and its cargo now belong to the German state. Other countries in the Baltic will be keeping a close eye on what it does—and how the Kremlin reacts—to keep the shadow fleet in check.
Bornholm should table its proposed industry estate until Copenhagen decides whether it will go ahead with its plans to build the converter station for two off-shore wind farms that would power the facility, an island council committee says.
A vote will be put before the full council later this month, but Jacob Trøst, the mayor, believes the national government’s decision in January to wait until after the German federal election to make its final decision makes proceeding impractical.
It is hoped that Germany will purchase the majority of the 3 megawatts of electricity the wind farms would produce. The rest is expected to be sent to eastern Denmark, but Bornholm would like some of it to be used to power an industry estate that would act as a crucible for energy start-ups.
Island businesses want work on the industry estate to continue. Questions like where it would be placed and when it would come on-line may be unanswerable at the moment, but, argues Michael Almeborg, the chair of the local chapter of DI, that should not stop the council from lining up the firms who will want to hear the answers when the council finally has them.
One of the ironies of Bornholm’s power grid is that, even though most of the island’s electricity is generated on the island, it is not until the undersea cable linking it to Sweden cuts out that Beof, the local power company, goes into island mode. Sadly for the environment, this means decoupling the wind turbines that give the island most of its energy and firing up four diesel-powered generators. The thinking is that green ambitions are good, but the 25 megawatts of stable energy the generators can deliver are critical for keeping the grid stable.
In 2026, however, Beof will flip the switch on a 10 megawatt battery that will help maintain grid stability, and not just in the event of an emergency. Developed with Hitachi Energy, the battery addresses the fundamental challenge that arises when relying on unpredictable renewable energy to meet predictable demand. Since no-one is talking about going back to oil or coal, the only supply-side option is to come up with a way balance the two. The Bornholm battery will accomplish this by absorbing excess electricity when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining, and then deliver it back when it is needed.
The battery’s importance extends beyond local energy needs. Energinet, the national grid operator, views such technologies as essential for future energy systems, and Bornholm could provide a model. In a world that is going green, island mode may soon become the new black.
Germany and its Baltic allies have flatly rejected suggestions that delivery of Russian gas via the Nord Stream 2 pipeline may resume. Rumours that such a plan are afoot emerged on Sunday, when the Financial Times, a news outlet, reported that a former boss of Gazprom, the Russian firm that operated the pipeline, was working to revive the €11 billion project.
To its boosters, the pipeline running along the floor of the Baltic Sea was a sign that Russia was securely tethered to Europe and the west. Its detractors, both those who remained unconvinced that Moscow was indeed an ally, as well as greens agitating for lower, greener energy consumption, were never sold on the first Nord Stream, let alone its sequel.
But when both were damaged by sabotage in September 2022 (by whom remains unknown), European countries, and Germany in particular, rushed to break their energy ties to Russia: today, Norway is Germany’s primary gas supplier, and, on 8 February, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania broke a power connection to Russia that dates back to the Soviet Union when they connected themselves to the EU grid.
Nothing suggests anyone is interested going back. “Independence from Russian gas is of strategic importance,” the German economy ministry insisted in its denial that Berlin was talking to Moscow about re-opening Nord Stream 2. With Europeans now looking to secure their future, it would appear that the era of Russian gas has passed.