Ét Grønt Holbæk

Ét Grønt Holbæk ("A Green Holbæk") is a citizen movement and community network in Holbæk, Zealand, launched at a founding meeting on 22 April 2025 at Holbæk Library. Founded by local resident Frederikke Oldin, the group holds monthly open meetings at Holbæk Library and organises residents around climate, environment, and nature in the Holbæk area. It is the corpus's first Nordic local-group entry, closing a gap on both Nordic geography and the data-centre opposition strand in Denmark. A working group within the broader network has become Denmark's most visible grassroots voice against a proposed 350 MW hyperscale data centre on the city's outskirts — framing the opposition explicitly around what artificial intelligence infrastructure's energy appetite means for Denmark's green-transition commitments.

Founding and organisation

The group was initiated by Frederikke Oldin, who had previously been active in nearby Lejre and turned her attention to Holbæk and its surroundings. Her stated aim was to help climate-minded residents connect with one another and act collectively. The group holds free, open monthly meetings at Holbæk Library and describes itself as a network working on multiple green-transition fronts — data-centre siting, renewable-energy projects in the surrounding municipality, and urban greening. A smaller working group within the network has focused specifically on the planned hyperscale data centre, with Søren Bak Sommer and Jakob Søndergaard as its principal public representatives.

The data-centre opposition

In September 2024, Holbæk Municipality announced it had received an inquiry from developer EMCH A/S to build one of the Nordic region's largest hyperscale data centres near the city's ring road. The Economy Committee endorsed the project on 18 September 2024, opening a planning process with a full Municipal Council decision expected through autumn. The planned facility would carry a capacity of 350 megawatt — exceeding all existing data centres in Denmark combined and is intended for AI processing, social media, streaming, and other data workloads. Its projected electricity demand equals six times what all of Holbæk Municipality currently consumes. Energinet's own grid screening confirmed that sufficient green electricity would be unavailable for 141 days annually, requiring gas-turbine backup to operate the facility's servers on 25 of those days.

The working group organised a public meeting at Holbæk Library at which the first 100 tickets sold out immediately, requiring an overflow room of 40 seats and live-streaming to accommodate demand; a second meeting followed at Viby Library in the Roskilde area. The group also filed freedom of information (aktindsigt) requests that revealed discrepancies between official claims and the project's actual job-creation numbers and energy dependencies. Søren Bak Sommer has named the campaign's escalation ambition directly: "the hope is to bring it all the way to Parliament" — the same national-legislature channel that Dutch campaigners at Stichting DataTruc Zeewolde used when a Senate motion helped block Meta's Zeewolde facility in 2022.

The group's central arguments move between the grid-capacity register and the democratic-commitment register. On capacity: powering the facility cleanly would require renewable-energy infrastructure roughly ten times the size of Northern Europe's largest existing solar park; the facility would also consume Holbæk Municipality's entire CO2 budget. On commitment: as Bak Sommer states, "we can't have a data center of that caliber with that energy consumption while also delivering the green transition we promised each other". A DTU professor in human-centred digitalisation, Brit Ross Winthereik, has called for broader public deliberation on data-centre energy impacts — providing academic framing the group has drawn on alongside its own activist communications.

Place in the movement

Ét Grønt Holbæk is the corpus's first Nordic local-group entry and its first Danish entry in the hyperscale data-centre opposition strand. Its strategic register — citizen network with a focused working group, information-public meetings, freedom-of-information accountability, and named Parliamentary escalation — sits within a European and global constellation of grassroots groups organising against specific hyperscale siting decisions: Stichting DataTruc Zeewolde in Flevoland (Netherlands), Voceras de la Madre Tierra in Querétaro (Mexico), MOSACAT in Santiago (Chile), and Tu Nube Seca Mi Río in Spain. The Danish and Dutch cases share a Northern European electricity-grid-stressed framing: electricity grid capacity, not water, anchors the opposition argument, though the agricultural-land and landscape-scale dimensions are also present.

What distinguishes Ét Grønt Holbæk within this constellation is its explicit naming of AI computation as the demand side of the problem. Where the Zeewolde campaign foregrounded Meta's corporate identity and agricultural-land stewardship, Holbæk's working group names AI infrastructure directly as the energy-appetite whose social licence for grid priority they are contesting — an early instance of a grassroots democratic claim about the terms on which AI infrastructure expansion should be permitted, stated in explicit rather than indirect terms.