{TWENTY years ago the farmers of the tiny East German town of Feldheim faced an uncertain future. Prices for crops and milk were falling, while energy prices were rising. Job cuts looked inevitable and farmers were anxious about their survival.}
It was a stroke of good fortune that a solution unexpectedly appeared to both of these problems. In 1995 Michael Raschemann, a young university student and budding entrepreneur, called in at the village, with a suggestion to erect a wind turbine as part of his research. The village was ideal, he said, as it was slightly higher than the surrounding land and the altitude guaranteed that there would be wind on most days.
Today, Feldheim, 40 miles south of Berlin, is an energy self-sufficient village with a new cash crop. The wind farm, which has grown to 47 turbines mostly owned by Mr Raschemann and his company Energiequelle and partly by the farmers, generates both cheap electricity and cash.
In 2008 Energiequelle bought an 111-acre former military site near Feldheim and constructed a 284-panel solar farm that produces more than 2,700MW a year.
The village provides electricity and heating to its residents at a third of the price paid by the German consumer. As it only needs 1% of what is produced, the rest — 175-million kilowatts a year — is sold into the regional grid contributing to Germany’s explosive renewable energy programme.
For days when the wind does not blow or it is terribly cold, the farmers and Energiequelle constructed a biogas plant, which makes methane gas from fermented maize and animal manure. The gas is burned to produce electricity, providing a guaranteed supply of energy, with the excess sold into the regional grid. The by-product of the process is returned to the fields as fertiliser.
The renewable energy revolution brought an astonishingly positive turn of events for Feldheim. It also illustrates the change that is sweeping German society and the overwhelming enthusiasm it has acquired for renewable energy.
Germany now has such an abundance of renewable energy with farmers, householders as well as commercial operators all feeding power into the grid, that on a windy, hot day in Germany the power system in neighbouring states is made unstable, as excess electrons flow into the grids of the Czech Republic and Poland.
The change has a name — “energiewende” — indicating a sudden change in direction, and is talked about in state, political and policy circles with national pride and at times, even a degree of religious fervour.
Its genesis lies in the German public’s emphatic rejection of nuclear power and the drive to eliminate it as quickly as possible.
Since the 1970s environmental groups and political parties have lobbied against nuclear power. After the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 this pressure grew and became an irresistible political demand after the Fukushima tsunami in 2011.
Independent energy think-tank Ecologic Institute director Andreas Kraemer says that opposition to nuclear energy is now unanimous across the political spectrum, with the exception of a small, extreme right-wing grouping.
The result is that nuclear power is to be phased out completely by 2022 and all Germany’s reactors — which once produced 27% of the country’s electricity — are to be decommissioned and shut down.
To encourage the change, the government from 2000 offered generous feed-in tariffs for generators of renewable energy and has now set a target that 80% of electricity production be provided by renewables by 2050.
As renewable energy does not yet have a viable storage solution, Germany plans to keep a 20% mix of fossil fuels, including lignite — or brown coal — and gas.
The change came faster than anyone anticipated. Farmers invested in turbines, householders set up photo-voltaic panels on their roofs and co-operatives and municipalities all become the providers of electricity.
By last year these providers were supplying 93% of the renewables coming into the grid, says Mr Kraemer.
Big utilities that before had dominated the energy market producing nuclear and coal-fired power, were left behind in the rush, and now have only 7% of the renewables market, in the form of large-scale wind farms in the North Sea.
The catch though, was that it was households who were to pay for their emphatic rejection of nuclear power. Retail electricity prices have almost doubled since 1999 and households pay an increasingly large surcharge for renewable energy, from which big business — which government wants to remain competitive — is exempt.
This arrangement also means that, strictly speaking, German renewable energy is not subsidised by the state, although not everyone in the European Union agrees with this perspective. But despite this controversial form of redistribution voters have nonetheless been shown to have accepted that it is they who must pay for the energiewende.
German Federal Foreign Office deputy director-general Ernst Fischer says that while a new round of reforms will soon reopen the pricing arrangements “there is a great consensus in our society in favour of the energiewende. A number of governments who have pushed it have been re-elected. People might complain, but if citizens were really unhappy they would not have supported their re-election as recently as last year”.
Although few other countries have households wealthy and environmentally activist enough to take on the cost of changing the energy mix, Germany now sees itself as a role model, says Mr Fischer, and wants other European countries to commit to both emissions reduction targets and new targets for renewable energy at the next round of negotiations at the European Commission.
One argument put forward by German officials and energy analysts on why the rest of Europe should follow suit is that in having invested as much as it has in renewable technologies, Germany has pioneered the pathway and has dramatically brought down the price of electricity.
Norway Fridtjof Nansen Institute senior energy research fellow Per Eikeland agrees with this view.
“What Germany has done with its ‘subsidies’ is pay for the development of renewable technology.
“Cost of producing photovoltaic panels has dropped 99% over the past 30 years.
In the past two years, since China began producing panels, costs have halved again. But it was all started by Germany,” he says.
BDLive
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