When governments fall short, ordinary people can spark extraordinary change. Nowhere is this more evident than in Denmark, where citizens and community groups took the lead in a wind energy revolution that helped set the country on a path to phase out fossil fuels entirely. Decades ago, while the Danish government was hesitating on clean energy, locals banded together to build wind turbines on their own. The result? Denmark today generates 84% of its electricity from renewables, with 54% being from wind. Denmark’s proved that the clean energy revolution can be powered by the people.
People-powered wind revolution
In the 1970s, Denmark faced an energy crossroads. The government was considering nuclear power, but ordinary Danes and NGOs had different ideas. A vibrant anti-nuclear movement emerged with the iconic slogan “Nuclear power? No thanks” and activists didn’t just protest, they offered a solution. Environmental groups and citizens began advocating for wind energy as the safe, clean alternative.
In fact, some communities simply went ahead and built turbines themselves. In 1978, a group of teachers and students constructed a then record-breaking wind turbine at Tvind, proving that local ingenuity could achieve what big utilities hadn’t. This DIY turbine, built by citizens on a shoestring, became a symbol of what grassroots innovation could do.
This early citizen leadership laid the foundation for Denmark’s wind power boom. By the late 1970s and early ’80s, rural communities and eco-minded cooperatives were installing wind turbines to power their towns and farms. Residents pooled funds to erect turbines, sharing both the electricity and the profits. By 1996 there were around 2,100 wind energy cooperatives across Denmark. These co-ops gave tens of thousands of people a direct stake in clean energy.
These citizen-led projects moved forward at a time when government support was modest. While officials slowly came around to renewables, communities were already proving wind power’s viability on the ground. By 2001, over 100,000 Danish families belonged to wind cooperatives that had installed 86% of all the nation’s turbines . In other words, regular people owned the majority of Denmark’s wind infrastructure, long before big energy companies jumped in. This bottom-up momentum not only built turbines, it built public pressure that pushed Denmark’s policies to be greener. Community and NGO leadership filled the gap when the government wasn’t doing enough and ultimately nudged the government to step up as well.
The Middelgrunden Model
A shining example is the Middelgrunden offshore wind farm near Copenhagen. Commissioned in 2000, this 40 MW facility is co-owned by the city’s utility and a cooperative of over 8,500 locals. Citizens invested approximately €23 million, covering half the project’s cost. Through extensive public consultations, the project garnered widespread support, turning potential opposition into pride. Investors saw returns of 6-7% annually, recouping their investments within eight years.
When the people lead a fossil fuel phase out
Middelgrunden was not a one-off, it was a model. Inspired by its success, more community wind projects blossomed across Denmark in the 2000s. In fact, Denmark’s government eventually adopted policies to cement community ownership in all new projects. A 2008 renewable energy law (implemented around 2011) requires that at least 20% of any new wind farm be offered to local residents for purchase. This policy ensures that as wind power expands, communities get a slice of the benefits.
Thanks to decades of grassroots action, Denmark has transformed from a fossil-fuel dependent nation into a global renewable energy leader. Wind now generates over half of Denmark’s electricity and much of that power belongs to the people. By 2016, more than 50% of Denmark’s wind capacity was owned by citizens or co-ops, not corporations.
This people-powered approach also fueled economic prosperity. Denmark became a wind manufacturing giant, with renewables employing around 2% of its workforce and generating billions through exports. Denmark’s transition shows that when the clean energy revolution belongs to the people, climate action and community prosperity go hand in hand.
Australia: ready for a community energy revolution
Looking at Denmark, you might think Australia, with our endless sun, wind and wide-open spaces would be following a similar path. We certainly have the natural potential to be a renewable energy superpower. Yet Australia’s renewable journey has been slower and bumpier, often held back by the influence of fossil fuel interests. While Denmark races toward 100% green electricity, only a bit under 40% of Australia’s electricity currently comes from renewables. And we remain one of the largest exporters of coal and gas. In many ways, Australia today is where Denmark was decades ago: the government is talking about climate solutions, but not acting fast enough. This is where Aussies can learn from the Danish playbook.
The good news is Australians are already stepping up. In the absence of strong federal action in years past, communities, NGOs, and everyday families have taken initiative. Just look at our rooftops: as of 2024, nearly 1 in 4 of Australian households have installed solar panels on their homes, the highest uptake of rooftop solar in the world. That’s millions of Australian families who decided to generate clean power on their own, often long before governments provided any substantial incentives.
Community energy projects are also gaining momentum here. Just look at Hepburn Wind in Victoria, Australia’s first community-owned wind farm. In the late 2000s, locals near Daylesford didn’t wait around for big energy companies to act. They came together, formed a cooperative, and raised nearly $10 million from 2,000 members to make their vision real. By 2011, two turbines were spinning, generating enough clean electricity to power over 2,000 homes.
Hepburn Wind shows what’s possible when communities take the lead. Like Denmark’s early wind pioneers, these locals proved that people-powered renewables can thrive in Australia too.
The power of communities: from Denmark to Down Under
The protest sought to increase pressure on the Australian government to commit to a timeline for a fair and fast phase out away from all fossil fuels, starting with no more coal and gas.
Australia is the world’s third largest exporter of fossil fuels, and the Newcastle Port is the world’s largest coal export port. On the final day of the “protestival”, 170 people were arrested while out in their kayaks blocking the channel to prevent coal ships from passing, successfully forcing one coal ship to turn around.
Danish residents didn’t wait for permission or perfect policies, they organised, invested, and built the future they wanted to see. In doing so, they dragged their leaders along with them and reaped rewards for their communities. Australians have that same spirit. We’ve seen it in the rooftop solar boom, in grassroots campaigns to stop new coal mines, and in local renewable projects that put people and the planet first.
The climate crisis demands urgent action, but Denmark shows that action can begin at the grassroots and turn into a national triumph. It’s a hopeful reminder that even if our leaders are slow, we don’t have to be. When communities lead, politicians will follow. As the Danes have shown, a greener future is not just up to governments or big companies, it’s in our hands. It’s time for Australia’s own people-powered energy revolution.
Sign the petition to demand no new fossil fuels and help spark the change we need.
Can Australia catch up? Top lessons from Denmark’s people-powered energy revolution
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
Ugandan farmers use British court to try to stop East Africa oil pipeline
Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or even £9tn. These figures, which came from Turver’s report, were based, among other things, on the implicit assumption that fossil fuels and the cars, boilers and power plants that use them are all free.)
After Turver’s report and article in January 2026, the erroneous £957bn figure was repeated in March by the Great British Think Tank. The organisation has the tagline “data, not vibes” and says of its work: “Every figure [is] sourced from official public bodies.”
The £957bn figure then appeared in the Conservative “Right Way” document in October 2026.
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