The small village of Føns empowers prosumers in many different ways
How to empower citizens for clean green transition? The village of Føns in Denmark tries to find out, as one of the pilot projects in the Interreg project EMPOWER2.0 . Føns combines ground source heat pumps with its own citizen driven heating system. It is Denmark’s newest and smallest community energy system, with 49 prosumers. The pilot is empowering citizens in the village, citizens from Denmark and audience from the rest of the world.
September 2021 has been busy. Attending at the national climate festival which welcomed approx. 10.000 attendees, the villagers offered guided tours to the project. The same month the villagers also held a village meeting to empower their community to become more efficient prosumers. They learned from research from the University of Southern Denmark SDU about the new heat pump system. And the villagers supported each other and shared experience in optimising the system by personally working with the “return-temperature” from their homes. Calculations suggest that by optimizing each homes return-temperature there could save around 10.000 euros. Later in September they received interested students from a high school in Greve and give inspiration to a delegation of experts from the Baltic Sea Region.