They say you can smell the fish from the harbour on a windy day in Esbjerg, but smell the money everyday.
The Danish seaside city, comparable in size to Coffs Harbour with a population of about 70,000, is known for successfully reinventing itself.
In the 1960s and 70s, it was a commercial seafood hub supporting 2000 fishermen, 670 vessels and 10,000 fishing-related jobs.
Moves to rein in overfishing compelled a scale back and these days there are only 10 active vessels and 500 jobs, mostly in processing.
Hit with crisis and forced to grapple with its over-dependence on imported oil, Denmark introduced car-free Sundays amid soaring prices in 1973.
In response, Esbjerg Port pivoted in the 1980s and 90s to “black gold”, servicing the rigs as the oil and gas industry took off in the North Sea.
Money also flowed and the city soon had more BMWs per capita than anywhere else in the nation.
By the early 1990s, as climate science firmed, Denmark introduced a carbon tax and built the world’s first offshore wind farm, Vindeby.
A decade later, Esbjerg too saw the future and today boasts the world’s largest offshore wind port.
“(In Australia) your mindset is still the black versus the green energy but this is gone in Denmark, it’s just energy,” says its chief operating officer, Jesper Banks, joking that his country is “colour blind”.
“It’s not that we have been green-minded in any way; we’ve just been looking for opportunities.
“We’ve been open-minded, we want our pay cheque. At the end of the day, it’s about money.”
The port is booked up until 2032 to service vessels installing wind turbines, as Europe races to install 10,000 of them in the North Sea to boost offshore energy capacity to at least 150 GW by 2050.
This will supply up to 230 million households.
The port is proactive about its future, regularly bussing in high school students on excursions to get a taste of lucrative high-tech careers in AI, big data, engineering, logistics, construction, legal, maintenance, welding, transport and mechanics.
Former master mariner Kurt Mathiesen has worked there for 36 years and seen firsthand the skill transfer from fishing to oil and gas and then wind.
There are presently about 30 boats dedicated to taxiing turbine technicians out to the offshore farms at 6am and collecting them at day’s end.
He expects that number to ramp up to 200.
“A lot of former fishermen are working as a captain or a mate on board of the vessels taking people out because those fishermen know how to react in the North Sea,” Mr Mathiesen says.
“It’s dangerous; big waves and a lot of traffic. They know how to operate in those waters.”
A tour of the port makes it clear Denmark invented Lego: pre-assembled turbine towers are loaded onto a jack-up ship called the Wind Keeper and dozens of 115-metre-long turbine blades are stacked neatly on racks.
When Tasmania’s Danish Queen Mary arrives home on a state visit on March 14, she will travel with a delegation of 55 companies, many representing movers and shakers behind Denmark’s energy transition.
While Australia’s Liberal and National parties tie themselves in knots over a 2050 net-zero emissions target, ambitious Denmark, which emits 0.1 per cent of global greenhouse gases compared to Australia’s 1.1 per cent, aims to go to net negative by 2050.
Two Danish companies, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and energy giant Orsted, want to build major offshore projects off Gippsland in Victoria.
Both are presently at feasibility stage.
Towns between Wilsons Promontory and Lakes Entrance might soon get the chance to emulate Esbjerg’s wind energy boom.
The Victorian government says its declared offshore wind area can potentially create 15,000 construction jobs and 7500 ongoing positions.
Orsted’s APAC President Per Mejnert Kristensen says Gippsland’s coast offers “Goldilocks conditions”.
“Gippsland has many of the fundamentals required to make offshore wind feasible and viable,” he tells a group of Australian reporters in Copenhagen.
“It has very good and consistent wind speeds, it has relatively shallow waters so you can use bottom-fixed technology, it is relatively closely located to off take and on top of that there is an existing grid.”
Export and Investment Fund of Denmark chief operating officer Peter Boeskov says it sees Australia as an attractive and reliable investment destination and has an unused country limit of $A10 billion.
For Denmark’s Climate and Energy Minister Lars Aagaard, countries that believe in science should work together.
“This change we will make in our (energy) system, decarbonising, it’s not something an individual country or region has a monopoly on,” he says.
“We are seeking partners, we are seeking business opportunities. I truly believe it is a two-way street.
“I think we will all be winners if we succeed in building more resilient, more secure decarbonised energy systems.”
A green energy transition requires political courage and Denmark has a lot of know-how to share on managing a grid with renewables, according to Danish Industry senior vice president Troels Ranis.
“We know what we are good at,” he tells AAP.
“We know what we can deliver: cheap energy for offshore wind.”
In December, Orsted was burned by the Trump Administration.
The Americans suspended leases on five offshore wind farms including the company’s multi-billion dollar Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects near Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York.
The delays cost the company up to $2.5 million a day, according to media reports.
US courts have since granted preliminary injunctions, giving the green light for construction to resume but the long-term damage to investor sentiment remains unclear.
Asked about Australian democracy’s track record of yo-yoing between climate action and undoing climate action, Mr Aagaard says if it wants a cheap energy transition, trust is everything.
“You can very, very rapidly destroy the trust of the private sector to invest in your country. It takes years to build trust,” he says.
“If you mess up their trust … what would the private sector do?
“Either they are not going to invest or they will increase the risk permit … all the costs for wind turbines, most of the cost is when you construct and install it.
“Therefore, the cost of capital is extremely important if you want a cheap green transition.
“If you are a clever government, you are concerned about the trust.”
Back at the port, Mr Mathiesen adjusts his fluorescent jacket collar in the wind and marvels at the turbine towers in a way that would make powerline-enthusiast Darryl Kerrigan, from 1997 film The Castle, proud.
“When a turbine has run for eight minutes, it can supply my wife and my household with electricity for one year,” he says.
Lisa Martin travelled across Denmark as a guest of a Danish Foreign Ministry’s media program.
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