Every year, Sønderborg welcomes decision makers and journalists from all over the world either on study tours or as participants at our conference Rethink Cities Summit. They come to know more about Sønderborg’s road to a carbon neutral energysystem, because our recipe for a green transition not only has the potential to solve the climate challenge locally. It can be used all over the world. It is part of our ambition to inspire other cities to create their own transformation. Together we can make a bigger postive impact on the climate.
Sønderborg’s position as the Global Capital of Energy was established i 2022, when we acted as host city for the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) conference. Whereas many conferences take place in meeting rooms, the participants at the conference in Sønderborg got the chance to experience some of Sønderborg’s energy-efficient solutions and technologiesn – with visits at e.g. Denmarks most energy efficient brick plant, a carbon-neutal building site and world’s longest ranging electric ferry.
During the conference, IEA Director Fatih Birol named Sønderborg “The Global Capital og Energy Efficiency”
Energy efficiency plays an important role in solving the climate crisis. The IEA’s own findings have concluded that energy efficiency can deliver a third of the reductions needed to reach the Paris Agreement’s climate goals.
The Action Plan named after Sønderborg
A reminder of the central role that energy efficiency can play in alleviating today’s energy challenges and providing a useful blueprint for governments to turn ambition into action. That is the ambition of Sønderborg Action Plan, which was one of the most important outcome of the IEA Conference in Sønderborg. The plan is a set of strategic principles and policy toolkits developed by the IEA that can help governments seeking to implement efficiency policies rapidly.
The importance of energy efficiency emphasized in the Sønderborg Action Plan gained global recognition at COP28 in Dubai in 2022, where governments committed to doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.
According to the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 pathway, achieving this goal requires annual progress to accelerate from the current 2% baseline to an average of over 4% per year by 2030.
Read the IEA report “The value of urgent action on energy efficiency”
Since 2022, every Global IEA Conference on Energy Efficiency has introduced new toolkits that build on the Sønderborg Action Plan, ensuring continued progress and innovation in energy efficiency strategies.
Read the Sønderborg Action Plan 2022
Read from Sønderborg to Versailles, 2023
Read from Versailles to Kenya, 2024
Sønderborg's recipe for a green turnaround
Reduce
Energy efficiency is maybe the most important key word in Sønderborg’s recipe for cost-effective decarbonization. When we use less energy to perform the same task, we eliminate energy waste. Today energy is being wasted everywhere across sectors. In the industrial sector, inefficient electric motors waste energy and the excess heat that is generated from production is not utilized. And in buildings vast amounts of energy is wasted because simple measures to monitor and control energy use are not in place.
Electrifying is also a way of saving energy because electricity in general waste far less energy than fossil fuels. In gasoline powered vehicles for instance around 80 percent of the energy is lost. Electric vehicles on the other hand uses 80 percent – wasting only 20.
The growing demand for green energy makes our focus on energy efficiency even more urgent. Reducing our energy waste makes it more likely that we can cover our energy need with energy based on renewables.
Reuse
Since green energy is a scarce resource, we must use it wisely, so that it puts as little strain on the energy system as possible. It increases the energy efficiency of the energy system and provides the cheapest and greenest energy consumption.
Sector integration is the final main lever in decarbonizing our energy system because it makes it possible to reuse the rejected and otherwise wasted energy.
It might sound a bit technical. But more importantly, sector integration is about people and partnerships – working together and maximizing synergies between sectors, connecting energy consumers with energy producers, and converting and storing energy.
The Sønderborg area is collaboratively developing an integrated energy system across various sectors. This enables us to optimize the utilization of excess heat by incorporating it into our district heating network. The anticipated outcome is that by 2029, up to 40 percent of our district heating will be sourced from surplus heat.
Sector integration has 3 development phases which complement each other and gradually create better opportunities for green energy consumption in society: Reuse excess heat, electrification, and Power-to-X on renewable energy.
One of the key challenges in decarbonizing our grid and increasing electrification is ensuring that supply matches demand. By looking at the energy system holistically and linking different energy sources, sector integration allows for flexible use of power. It enables discrepancies in supply and demand to be evened out so we can exploit the full capacity of the grid. Balancing the peaks will be particularly important as we increase the use of renewables and electrification takes pace.
Digitalization is the intelligent glue that moves renewable energy, streamline, and reduces energy consumption across sectors – making the decarbonization cheaper.
Renewables
No matter how effective our efforts are in conserving and reusing energy, we will always have a substantial energy requirement. Therefore, it is essential, that we ensure our future energy needs are completely met with clean energy sourced from wind turbines, solar farms and biogas production. And green district heating instead of fossil fuels for heating.
The most effective way to secure a 100 percent green energy supply is by actively producing as much of it as we can. This is why we presently operate two biogas facilities in the towns of Kværs and Glansager. Furthermore, there are ambitious plans for an offshore wind farm in the Little Belt east of Als, in addition to expanding wind turbine and solar panel installations on land.
Efficient and sustainable PtX production is essential for a deep decarbonization. A PtX plant can convert and store excess renewable energy as hydrogen. And while this conversion comes with an energy loss, hydrogen will be key to decarbonizing hard-to abate sectors such as heavy industry production, long-distance shipping, and long-haul aviation.
Since hydrogen production will have a massive pull on the electricity grid in the future, it is of great importance to use it wisely for the right purposes. Hydrogen production must be based on additional locally produced renewable power to be sustainable, and we must ensure that the production is as efficiently as possible by reusing excess heat in district heating and not create unnecessary disturbances on the grid.
Inspiring the world
Join our Rethink Cities Summit
Rethink Cities Summit is a action-orientated climate conference that aim to unite global leaders to drive sustainable urban development through public-private collaboration, sharing best practices and scalable solutions.
It is held for the first time on the 8th and 9th of September 2025 in Sønderborg.
Do do want to join in 2025 or in the future?
The EU Mission Label
In 2023, Sonderborg received the EU Mission Label. The award is the European Commission’s quality stamp of the ProjectZero Masterplan that is leading the way to making our energy system carbon-neutral by 2029.
Sonderborg is amongst the first 10 cities receiving the award – and the first in Denmark.
Cities account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions and consume over 65% of the world’s energy. In 2022 the EU therefore appointed 100 ambitious climate cities to take part in developing new methods for green transition to support all European cities in becoming climate neutral by 2050.
The designated cities must all draw up a Climate City Contract (CCC), which contains the city’s goals and plans for climate neutrality. The Mission Label states that their Climate City Contract has been reviewed and approved by the European Commission with support from experts – including the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Joint Research Center (JRC).
Obtaining the EU’s Mission Label can, among other things, help facilitate access to funding from the EU, national and regional funding sources, including private investment.
Singapore inspired by Sønderborg
By 2030, at least one in five educational institutions in Singapore will be carbon neutral. This is one of several goals in the ambitious Green Plan, which aims to make Singapore an Asian role model in sustainability.
One of Singapore’s largest universities, Singapore Polytechnic, wants to be a national role model and make its entire campus carbon neutral. The recipe comes from our ProjectZero and we have agreed to be partners on the Asian project.
Singapore’s ProjectZero still doesn’t have an official name, but it will be a localized version of Sønderborg’s vision. The ambition is for Singapore Polytechnic to serve as an inspiration and showcase for Singapore’s other educational institutions.
The project in Singapore will encompass the entire 38-hectare campus, which, in addition to teaching facilities for 12,800 students, is also home to student housing, shops and an area with sports facilities such as a swimming pool and stadium.
Powering European Industry
Following Mario Draghi’s report “The Future of European Competitiveness”, in October 2024, the Powering European Industry summit brought industry leaders, policymakers, and analysts to Sønderborg to explore strategies for enhancing European competitiveness.
With insights from reports by the IEA, BusinessEurope, and Danfoss, the event highlighted Sønderborg’s ProjectZero as a replicable blueprint for addressing competitiveness from an energy perspective.
His Majesty King Frederik X of Denmark opened the conference, which concluded that unlocking energy efficiency and electrification investments is one of the most cost-effective ways to secure energy supplies, reduce energy costs, and boost competitiveness.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY NEED AN UPDATED NARRATIVE
Prior to the 2023 Global IEA Conference on Energy Efficiency, the President and CEO of the Sønderborgbased multinational energy company Danfoss, Kim Fausing, and the Danish Minister for Development Cooperation and Global Climate Policy, Dan Jørgensen stressed the need to update the thinking and policies to reflect the role of energy efficiency in a future energy system based on renewables.
“Energy efficiency is so much more than reducing demand, and it will become even more important as the clean energy transition accelerates. It is using digital solutions such as IoT and AI to create the flexibility that our energy systems will need as the share of renewables grow. It is using electrification and sector integration to use our energy smarter, matching supply and demand. We know that excess heat – from supermarkets, data centres, industry, wastewater treatment plants – in the EU corresponds to the total energy demand for hot water in residential and service sector buildings,” they stated in an opinion in Euractiv – an independent pan-European media network.