The South Australian government claimed that, when it comes to renewable energy, South Australia is ‘not just the leader of the pack—it’s in a league of its own’. Indeed the state government has argued that if South Australia were a country, then it would be comparable to Denmark in its level of variable renewable penetration.
The comparison between Denmark and South Australia has also been drawn by other supporters of and participants in the renewable energy transition. In 2024, SA Power Networks boasted that ‘71 per cent of [the] energy demand in South Australia [was] met by variable renewables – second only to Denmark’.
Advocates of renewable energy uptake regularly point to the success of Denmark, which has experienced an excess of 100 per cent renewable electricity generation in short intermittent bursts for some time now. On 22 February 2017, for instance, it was reported that ‘wind power supplied 104 per cent of the country’s energy needs for the day’. The hype surrounding these intermittent days of excess renewables has been interpreted by some to mean that a country can run entirely on variable renewable energy sourced, for instance, from wind and solar.
This is a fallacy—namely, a mistaken belief based on a flawed assumption. In this case, the assumption is that all energy needs can come from just the electricity sector; and meeting a country’s entire electricity needs from variable renewables, as Denmark did on 22 February 2017, is possible, replicable, and sustainable. This is not the case. What has been claimed to be happening is not actually happening.
- Denmark’s energy security is underwritten by imports, which heavily feature hydrocarbon fuel. Net energy imports account for more than 44 per cent of total energy supply and net electricity imports account for more than 10 percent of total electricity supply in Denmark in 2023.
- Coal, gas, and oil are still responsible for roughly half of Denmark’s energy supply and play a significant role outside of the electricity sector
- Danish electricity consumers pay more for each kWh of electricity than people from most other nations on the planet.
