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In 1979 the government began a program of subsidies and loan guarantees to build up its nascent wind industry and mandated that utilities purchase wind energy at a preferential price--thus guaranteeing investors a customer base. Residents of the Danish island of Samso, like Brian Kjar, left, with his electric car, have turned to wind farms and solar energy to erase their carbon footprint ON YOUR BIKE Wide bicycle lanes in Copenhagen, top right, encourage people not to use cars, while blue stripes and pictograms on the asphalt help easily identify the cyclists CLEAN UP On opening day at a Danish power station, right, where biofuels produce 15% of the energy, children and adults peer at the plant's turbines SUN'S HARVEST Like many Samso farmers, Erik Koch, far right, has fitted the roof of his home with solar panels to heat his water SCOOPING THE WIND Each blade of these wind turbines, right, weighs in at 15,400 lb. and gathers gusts with every revolution.

How Denmark's green energy initiatives power its economy.

If you want to know why Denmark is the world's leader in wind power, take a three-hour drive from the capital, Copenhagen, to the small town of Lem on the far west coast of the Jutland peninsula. You'll feel it as you cross the 4.2-mile-long (6.8 km) Great Belt Bridge: Denmark's bountiful wind, so fierce even on a calm day that it threatens to shove your car into the waves below. But wind alone wouldn't do its stuff without technology. In Lem, workers build the wind turbines sold by Vestas, the Danish company that has emerged as the industry's top manufacturer around the globe. The turbines' blades are as smooth as an Olympic swimsuit and honed to aerodynamic perfection.

Beyond having plenty of puff and smart technology, however, Denmark has been a success in wind power because it wanted to be. In 1979 the government began a program of subsidies and loan guarantees to build up its nascent wind industry and mandated that utilities purchase wind energy at a preferential price--thus guaranteeing investors a customer base. Energy taxes were channeled into research centers. As a result, the country gets more than 19% of its electricity from the breeze (Spain and Portugal, the next-highest wind-energy-producing countries, get about 10%), and Danish companies control at least one-third of the global wind market.

The challenge for Denmark now is to help the rest of the world catch up. Beyond wind, the country (pop. 5.5 million) is a world leader in energy efficiency. Carbon emissions are down 13.3% from 1990 levels, and total energy consumption has barely moved, even as Denmark's economy has continued to grow at a healthy clip. With Copenhagen set to host U.N. climate-change talks in December--a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol will be discussed--and the global recession beginning to hit environmental plans everywhere, Denmark's example couldn't be more timely.

While countries like the U.S. let tax credits for renewable energy wax and wane, smothering infant green industries in the crib, Denmark has stuck with them. How come? In a word: fear. When the 1973 oil crisis hit, 90% of Denmark's energy came from petroleum, almost all of it imported. Buffeted by supply shocks, Denmark launched a drive for energy conservation. Eventually, Middle East oil started flowing again, but unlike most other countries, Denmark never forgot the lessons of 1973 and kept working for greater energy efficiency and a more diversified supply. For example, the Riso National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, which has long been on the cutting edge in wind technology, is now a global leader in hydrogen-fuel-cell research. From the use of combined heat and power plants to the way it builds homes to maximize efficiency, Denmark leads the way.

The fruits of investment and innovation are best tasted in a place that has emerged as the symbol of Denmark's greenness: Samso island. When Samso won a competition 10 years ago to become a model for how a community can run on renewable energy, it was entirely dependent on oil and coal imported from the mainland. A little more than a decade later, Samso is effectively carbon-negative, producing more than 100% of the electricity it needs from renewable sources.

A tour of Samso feels a bit like a greatest-hits collection of Denmark's successful energy policies. The island features district heating plants fired by waste biomass like straw. When the sun is shining--which, admittedly, is not often--solar thermal panels provide hot water. Wind power is everywhere--on land, where towering turbines shade cows on a dairy farm, and offshore, where 10 turbines greet the incoming ferries like a row of sentinels. Many of the turbines are owned collectively by resident associations, and others by single investors like Jorgen Tranberg, a dairy farmer. Tranberg, who likes to spend his spare time watching his cows on closed-circuit TV ("It's better than the news"), believes Samso's success could be replicated elsewhere. "We're not special people here," he says.

But there is something special in the way Samso's residents--and Danes as a whole--have adapted to 21st century realities about energy and the environment. Soren Hermansen, a former farmer and environmental-studies teacher, who lobbied, cajoled and pushed his neighbors on Samso to go green, credits the Danish tendency to organize in groups. "To us, going for lower energy use is like a sport," he says.

That sense of communal competition may be one reason Denmark has done so well. But in the Scandinavian mind-set, cooperation is as important as competition. (The Nordic nations, for example, share an electrical grid, and Denmark can take power from its neighbors when there's no wind and sell it when the breeze blows.) "Denmark says, 'We can do this. Come join us,'" says Annie Petsonk of the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund.

Just so long as we're not expected to watch cows on TV.

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ZERO CARBONS?

Residents of the Danish island of Samso, like Brian Kjar, left, with his electric car, have turned to wind farms and solar energy to erase their carbon footprint

ON YOUR BIKE

Wide bicycle lanes in Copenhagen, top right, encourage people not to use cars, while blue stripes and pictograms on the asphalt help easily identify the cyclists

CLEAN UP

On opening day at a Danish power station, right, where biofuels produce 15% of the energy, children and adults peer at the plant's turbines

SUN'S HARVEST

Like many Samso farmers, Erik Koch, far right, has fitted the roof of his home with solar panels to heat his water

SCOOPING THE WIND

Each blade of these wind turbines, right, weighs in at 15,400 lb. and gathers gusts with every revolution. Samso now produces more renewable energy than it uses