To reach Denmark's 2030 climate goals, the country must reduce carbon emissions by more than 10 million tons. A big part of this solution is to upscale the country's wind energy by installing 16 new wind turbines every month, primarily coastal or on land.

However, in 2022, the energy sector in Denmark faced a shocking reality. In the past two years, 82% of all projected wind farms had been stopped due to local protests and a 'Not-In-My-BackYard' mindset (NIMBY): Danes might love the green transition, but when it happens in our own backyard, we get off the train.

As Denmark's leading energy provider with a mission to accelerate the green transition, Andel saw a calling to change this.

Nationwide we wanted to spark a debate about the implication of the renewable transition of having a NIMBY mindset, creating more support for wind turbines all over the country.

In Denmark, the legislation means that the politicians in the individual municipalities have the right to veto the establishment of large, green infrastructure projects. When a project meets solid local opposition, politicians become nervous and are reluctant to approve projects for fear of not being re-elected. That resulted in 82% of all projected wind farms being stopped in two years before 2022.

The problem was the local opposition seemed much more significant than it really was. The NIMBYs were very good at creating noise and attention around their opposition to the wind turbine projects, and the municipalities had begun to perceive it as the typical attitude.

The silent majority had become drowned by the vocal minority. We needed to give the positive side a new and louder voice.

We wanted to create a solution that could fulfill a two-fold purpose: To spark a nationwide debate about the implication of the renewable transition if everybody had a NIMBY mindset and simultaneously activate the silent majority that wanted more wind turbines.

“The Green Search” became an immersive, integrated campaign that invited all Danes to show their support for wind energy in their local area. On social media, people could voice their support, and on a website, Danes could submit exact locations where they would like to see more wind turbines, while people with a mobile AR filter could experiment with how a wind turbine would look in a specific landscape.

The campaign showed the heart of the problem and the complex challenges Denmark and Andel faced in developing sustainable energy. This resulted in the campaign line, “It’s hard to reach a green future if we won’t make space for it.”

We conducted a nationwide survey showing that 81% of Danes favored setting up more wind turbines. It starkly contrasted the image the NIMBYs were trying to create. But our research also showed that those who opposed more wind turbines locally were much more emotionally engaged - and therefore much more vocal about their opposition. Thus, NIMBYs appeared to the politicians as a much larger target group because "perception is reality".

However, the insight also gave us the essential argument to the politicians that most of their voters in the municipality were positive about more wind turbines, which we had the opportunity to document, as the data set was large enough to break down at the municipality level.

The campaign was launched with a nationwide 360° campaign across multiple platforms that encouraged the Danes to take part in the initiative by visiting our website and suggesting a location in their local area.

A hero film that starred real, local protesters launched the campaign on TV and social media, while an extensive, hyper-targeted OOH effort further introduced the initiative. Across digital media, we followed up with an entire content ecosystem of 46 unique creatives tailored to each step in the user journey. For example, each local area was targeted by unique campaign content adapted to their city or region, and the most engaged citizens could even experience how a wind turbine would look in their local area using a newly developed AR filter for Instagram.

PR outreach led to national coverage in several Danish news outlets, both nationally and locally, which provided further coverage of the campaign and the

The Danes' engagement with The Green Search was overwhelming. Digitally the campaign had an engagement rate of +8%, and people submitted more than 11.700 unique wind turbine locations across the country, providing a database of locally-approved sites for future sustainable energy projects that Andel and all other companies will be able to access.

Every major media and TV station picked up the campaign, and a whopping 49% of all adult Danes could recall the campaign afterward.

More importantly, The Green Search also changed people's attitudes. 25% of Danes who had seen the campaign said it had made them contribute more to the green transition. 23% of Danes said it convinced them to show more support for wind energy.

As of 2023, one new giant wind farm in Southern Denmark is in development following the initiative, proving that creative ideas can help overcome the obstacles to the green transition.