- Email: [email protected]
Germany’s Energiewende
7
CHAPTER
Germany’s Energiewende: Community-Driven Since the 1970s Craig Morris Director of Petite Planète, Krozingerstr., Freiburg, Germany
Contents A Fledgling Movement from the 1970s 106 The Energiewende Today 109 Community Ownership Today 110 Conclusions112
German Chancellor Angela Merkel turned a lot of heads both inside and outside Germany when she reversed her position on nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima accident in March 2011. Only 7 months prior to the earthquake in Japan, Merkel’s coalition had extended the service lives of the country’s nuclear fleet by up to 14 years,1 essentially extending the shutdown of the last nuclear plant from 2022 to the 2030s. Then, in 2011, Merkel essentially returned the country to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder’s original nuclear phase-out target, so the last nuclear plant once again gets shut down in 2022. But there are two major differences: (1) 8 of the country’s 17 nuclear plants were switched off within a week and (2) dates are set for the remaining plants, with no wiggle room left for the firms (Schröder’s original plan allowed plant operators to shift kilowatt-hour allotments from one plant to another so they could switch one off earlier and another one later). Merkel’s about-face has led many onlookers to associate the Energiewende with this second sudden nuclear phase out, but the original nuclear phase out 1 In
an official statement entitled “German Nuclear Power Plants Are Safe,” Merkelʼs coalition defended the extension of nuclear plant commissions by saying that “An explosion or fire—like the one that happened in Chernobyl—is not possible” in any German nuclear plant (http://www.bunde stag.de/presse/hib/2010_08/2010_265/02.html).
Global Sustainable Communities Handbook http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-397914-8.00007-2
© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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was implemented a decade earlier, and one could go even further back to three major policies to support renewables: • The Feed-in Act of 1991, which gave generators of nuclear power the right to connect to the grid and guaranteed them payment as a share of the retail rate (such as 80% of the retail rate for wind power) • The Renewable Energy Act (EEG) of 2000, which unlinked the calculation for these payments (called “feed-in tariffs”) from the retail rate; now, the cost of a reference system (a wind turbine, say, or a biomass unit of a particular size) was estimated, and a small profit margin of 5–7% was added on to ensure that not only the least expensive source of renewable power (onshore wind) was built. • The amendment of the EEG in 2004, which made photovoltaics eligible for feed-in tariffs without restriction for the first time. Like the sudden phase out in 2011, the amendment in 2004 was spectacular and has therefore drawn the most attention, thereby skewing our understanding. While the feed-in tariffs for wind power were always below the retail rate and those for electricity from biomass were generally near it, roughly half a euro was paid for photovoltaics at the time—around three times the average retail rate in Germany at the time. These feed-in tariffs for photovoltaics led people to conflate the policy with exorbitant subsidies,2 and many prominent analysts have charged that feed-in tariffs can be done away with once grid parity (the point where power from a solar array costs the same as power from a wall socket) has been reached.3 Clearly, however, such arguments overlook the origin of feed-in tariffs for all renewables, not just photovoltaics. With the exception of photovoltaics, German feed-in tariffs have always been below the retail rate and, as seen here, they now all are—even for solar. One should think of feed-in tariffs not as a startup mechanism for the most expensive types of renewable energy, but rather as a way of protecting small investors in competition with corporations as a way of turning citizens into power producers.
A FLEDGLING MOVEMENT FROM THE 1970S If we go back to the 1970s, we discover a widespread movement across all of Germany. In that decade, people of all walks of life came together 2 See
the authorʼs rebuttal of an article in Forbes at http://www.renewablesinternational.net /a-spectacular-fail-by-command-economists/150/537/61648/. 3 See the authorʼs response to an article by Navigant’s Paula Mints in 2011: ‘Feed-in tariffs needed after grid parityʼ at http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/02/feed-intariffs-needed-after-grid-parity.
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in “Energiewende groups” to discuss how to overcome corporate control of the power sector—and hence, of their communities—by making energy themselves. Pastors, farmers, and scientists all came together to squat on the land where plants were to be built. The government responded with authoritarian force, which only increased the number of protesters until the police were overwhelmed. In 1980, three of the researchers involved in the movement published a book entitled (in German) Energiewende: Growth and Prosperity Without Petroleum and Uranium. The book stresses that distributed energy—including biomass and coal in small cogeneration units—will be “hard for large corporations to monopolize.”4 The movement focused initially on opposition to two nuclear plants, one in the south (Wyhl, which was never built) and the other in the north (Brokdorf, which was completed). From the outset, the Energiewende was thus linked to opposition to nuclear, but that opposition focused less on safety issues and more on who should get to decide what; specifically, should corporations and the government be able to tell communities they will have to accept construction of new industry? It was a democratic ground-roots uprising against authoritarian technocrats or, as one of the authors of the book from 1980 recently told the author in an interview, “our work did away with the claimed monopoly on technological competence that the energy industry used to assert: that there were no technically feasible alternatives to its ideas.” The movement led to a number of changes still visible today. For instance, German Environmental Minister Peter Altmaier approved carbon capture and storage (CCS) in 2012 contingent upon the consent of nearby communities. The international press reported the news as a compromise that would step up CCS “on a test basis,”5 but in fact Altmaier himself saw the decision as the death knoll for CCS: “We cannot store carbon dioxide underground against the will of the population. And I do not see any political acceptance in a single German state for CCS.”6 The experience has been the same with conventional coal power. As German environmental nongovernmental organization Klima-Allianz explains, there are no federal laws that limit coal plant construction in 4 See
the author’s review of the book at http://energytransition.de/2013/03/time-for-a-coal-phaseout/. 5 See Reuters http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-27/news/sns-rt-germany-energyco2l6e8hrhgl-20120627_1_emissions-ccs-bundesrat. 6 See http://www.renewablesinternational.net/germany-rejects-new-coal/150/537/39718/.
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Figure 1 German citizens are behind most of the investments in new renewables, with the Big Four utilities only having made up less than 7% of the pie by the end of 2010.
Germany, but local community governments have the power to influence—and even reject—new coal plant projects.7 Similar restrictions will apply when Germany attempts to select a site for its final nuclear waste repository. Still, opposition to conventional energy monopolies will only get one so far—what should this electricity be replaced with? In the late 1980s, the first feed-in tariffs were implemented in three German towns, and when the policy slipped into the last day of the Bundestag’s legislative session in 1991, the conventional energy sector did not think a little bit of renewables would hurt. Even in 1994, when Germany had 3% hydropower, they still claimed that renewables could never make up more than 4% of supply8 (see Figure 1). The rest, as they say, is history. The law led to a significant ground-roots movement in wind power and, to a lesser extent, in biomass. Most projects were community owned and “organic,” as a representative of DEWI, the 7 See
http://www.die-klima-allianz.de/keine-neuen-kohlekraftwerke/hintergrund/. come a long way, baby” at http://energytransition.de/2013/03/weve-come-a-longway-baby/.
8 See “We’ve
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German organization that tallies wind statistics, once told the author, who had noticed around 2005 that the American Wind Energy Association listed wind farms by size and owner, but DEWI did not. When the author called to ask why, they said ownership is too splintered in Germany, with dozens or even hundreds of local businesses and citizens having purchased shares of projects.9 Furthermore, wind farms in Germany start off with a small number of turbines, the DEWI representative explained. A community may put up a couple of turbines, and when they run well, those who were skeptical may realize what a good investment the project was and get on board for another round of turbines a few years later.The result is diverse ownership and wind farms that look like a museum of different technologies.
THE ENERGIEWENDE TODAY By June 30, 2010, all European Union(EU) member states were required to publish their National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAP) for 2020.10 Germany’s current targets for its energy transition up to that point are essentially the same as those in the NREAP—further evidence for the Energiewende is not related to the sudden nuclear phase out of 2011 as shown in Figure 2 on German energy transition. For instance, the country aimed to have 38.6% of its electricity from renewables by the end of this decade in its NREAP. That figure has now been rounded down to 35%. Whereas the original Energiewende book from 1980 actually considers all three sectors of energy use (electricity, heat, and motor fuel), the current energy transition has been criticized for being merely an “electricity transition.” Nonetheless, Germany is well poised to reduce the demand for heat. In the early 1990s, the German-speaking world brought about Passive House, a style of architecture with ventilation heat recovery that allows homes even in the climate north of the Alps to make do with small backup heaters. Process heat can also come increasingly from waste heat, which will improve the overall efficiency of energy consumption. Moreover, the heat sector is increasingly being seen as a way of storing excess renewable power. Denmark, which has a much more ambitious target of 100% renewable energy (not just electricity), is banking on electric 9 See “Renewables
from the bottom up” at http://archive.truthout.org/article/craig-morris-renewables-from-bottom-up. 10 See http://ec.europa.eu/energy/renewables/transparency_platform/doc/dir_2009_0028_action_pl an_germany.zip
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Figure 2 As this chart shows, Germany does not have a target of 100% renewables by 2050 in any area. In fact, its most ambitious target is for the electricity sector, with power consumption to drop by 25 percentage points and renewables to make up 80% of that lower demand. In contrast, the targets for heat and transport fuel are much more modest. Source: www.energytransition.de.
heating systems, which will cut on when power production exceeds power demand, thereby offsetting natural gas and oil used for heating purposes.11 The main shortcomings are found in the transport sector. Germany has no specific roadmap for transitioning from motor fuels to some kind of renewable supply.
COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP TODAY In all likelihood, Germany will therefore reach its targets for renewable power and heat, and it will continue to do so with great citizen participation and input.The result has been a marginalization of conventional power companies that have seen their profits and market shares shrink—an outcome that confuses foreign onlookers greatly.
11 See “Electric
heaters: a way of storing excess renewable power?” at http://www.renewablesinternati onal.net/electric-heaters-a-way-of-storing-excess-renewable-power/150/537/59292/.
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For instance, Canada’s Financial Post wrote12 in 2013 that “subsidized” renewables are “getting ever nearer to destroying the business model of companies meant to invest in renewables, namely the big sector leaders such as Eon and RWE.” In fact, the German renewables’ sector has been telling conventional energy firms since the 1990s that they aim to marginalize them and offset conventional power—as mentioned previously, politicians and energy firms simply did not think it was possible. The German tradition of citizen Energiewende meetings lives on today in places such as Jühnde, which became the country’s first “bioenergy village,” and Dardesheim, home of one of the largest community-owned wind farms in the country. As the project director in Dardesheim once told the author,13 he held town meetings for years to get enough consent. Indeed, citizen participation is now considered a standard way of overcoming NIMBYism, as the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) puts it in its brochure on community wind power.14 The focus on community ownership is one reason why the BWE seems so tepid about offshore wind and so supportive of onshore wind.15 The former consists mainly of gigantic projects that can only be financed by large corporations, whereas communities in Germany have always wanted to make their own power, which doesn’t just mean not importing from abroad, but also not buying from an oligarchy of domestic corporations. Going forward, Germany is even looking into ways of expanding community ownership of energy infrastructure. At present, there is a campaign among citizens of Berlin to buy back the city’s power grid, and new power lines built across the country could also be partly opened up to citizen investors.16 Unfortunately, an attempt by a citizens’ group to own part of the Butendiek offshore wind farm did not work out, and the project has been sold to wind farm developer WPD—further evidence that offshore wind and community ownership do not go hand in hand. 12 http://business.financialpost.com/2013/01/21/germany-grapples-with-switch-to-renewables/?__
lsa=1085-837b. energy” at http://www.boell.org/downloads/Morris_GermanEnergyFreedom.pdf. 14 See http://www.wind-energie.de/sites/default/files/download/publication/community-windpower/bwe_broschuere_buergerwindparks_engl_2012_l06_final.pdf. For another example in English of one of the country’s many villages “going green,” see the PBS video entitled “Germany’s green revolution” http://video.pbs.org/video/2326679795/. 15 See the interview with BWE head Hermann Albers at http://www.renewablesinternational.net/po wer-market-design-20/150/537/59421/. 16 See “Berlin to buy back its grid” at http://www.renewablesinternational.net/berlin-to-buy-backits-grid/150/537/38111/and “German grid could open to citizen investors” at http://www.renewa blesinternational.net/german-grid-could-open-to-citizen-investors/150/537/58612/. 13 See “German
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CONCLUSIONS While the task may seem daunting, Germany’s energy transition actually appears a bit unambitious when viewed from Denmark, which has even stricter targets, and the German nuclear phase out also seems quite modest compared to Austria’s decision not only to forgo domestic nuclear power, but also ban imports of nuclear power imports starting in 2015.17 But then, those who wonder whether Germany will succeed should consider how surprising the current outcome is.While many speak of exorbitant subsidies for renewables, cloudy Germany actually has the least expensive solar power in the world, with midsize solar roof arrays in Germany producing electricity at half the cost of utility-scale solar plants in sunny California—the difference is largely directly attributable to the corporate control of markets in the United States.18 The highest solar feed-in tariff paid (as of June 1, 2013, with further reductions made for new systems each month) was just 0.15 euros per kilowatt-hour, with the average retail rate at around 0.27 euros. Critics warned of industry leaving the country, but Germany continues to weather the current crisis with a healthy economy and the lowest unemployment rate since reunification two decades ago.19 Critics warned of blackouts, but Germany had the lowest number of minutes of grid downtime of any EU country in 2011 (Figure 3; data for 2012 were not available as of this writing). Critics spoke of a reliance on nuclear imports, but in 2012, Germany reached a record level of net power exports, and Germany is the only country with which nuclear-heavy France has a negative power trade balance.20 Others warned that Germany would need to export its excess (and expensive) renewable power on the cheap while it imports inexpensive conventional power at a premium, but in 2012 the value of a kilowatt-hour of
17 See
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/austria-to-discontinue-imports-of-nuclearpower/150/537/38088/. 18 See http://www.renewablesinternational.net/rfps-make-renewables-artificially-expensive/150/510/57958/. 19 See http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-germany-employment-idUSBRE91 I0V720130219. 20 See http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-energy-consumption-up-adjusted-co2-emissions-down/150/537/59443/ and http://www.renewablesinternational.net/france-net-powerexporter-except-to-germany/150/537/59937/.
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Figure 3 Germany had the most reliable grid in the EU in terms of minutes of downtime excluding natural disasters.
electricity Germany exported was roughly 7% above the value of the average kilowatt-hour imported.21 Indeed, it seems that just about all of the expectations that critics of the Energiewende had have turned out to be unfounded, at least as of this writing. Perhaps that is because these critics have not done one crucial thing that Germans do: pay attention to the macroeconomic impact of the switch from corporate-owned conventional energy to community-owned renewables on their national economy.
21 See
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-more-valuable-than-impo rts/150/537/61663/.
CHAPTER
Germany’s Energiewende: Community-Driven Since the 1970s Craig Morris Director of Petite Planète, Krozingerstr., Freiburg, Germany
Contents A Fledgling Movement from the 1970s 106 The Energiewende Today 109 Community Ownership Today 110 Conclusions112
German Chancellor Angela Merkel turned a lot of heads both inside and outside Germany when she reversed her position on nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima accident in March 2011. Only 7 months prior to the earthquake in Japan, Merkel’s coalition had extended the service lives of the country’s nuclear fleet by up to 14 years,1 essentially extending the shutdown of the last nuclear plant from 2022 to the 2030s. Then, in 2011, Merkel essentially returned the country to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder’s original nuclear phase-out target, so the last nuclear plant once again gets shut down in 2022. But there are two major differences: (1) 8 of the country’s 17 nuclear plants were switched off within a week and (2) dates are set for the remaining plants, with no wiggle room left for the firms (Schröder’s original plan allowed plant operators to shift kilowatt-hour allotments from one plant to another so they could switch one off earlier and another one later). Merkel’s about-face has led many onlookers to associate the Energiewende with this second sudden nuclear phase out, but the original nuclear phase out 1 In
an official statement entitled “German Nuclear Power Plants Are Safe,” Merkelʼs coalition defended the extension of nuclear plant commissions by saying that “An explosion or fire—like the one that happened in Chernobyl—is not possible” in any German nuclear plant (http://www.bunde stag.de/presse/hib/2010_08/2010_265/02.html).
Global Sustainable Communities Handbook http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-397914-8.00007-2
© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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was implemented a decade earlier, and one could go even further back to three major policies to support renewables: • The Feed-in Act of 1991, which gave generators of nuclear power the right to connect to the grid and guaranteed them payment as a share of the retail rate (such as 80% of the retail rate for wind power) • The Renewable Energy Act (EEG) of 2000, which unlinked the calculation for these payments (called “feed-in tariffs”) from the retail rate; now, the cost of a reference system (a wind turbine, say, or a biomass unit of a particular size) was estimated, and a small profit margin of 5–7% was added on to ensure that not only the least expensive source of renewable power (onshore wind) was built. • The amendment of the EEG in 2004, which made photovoltaics eligible for feed-in tariffs without restriction for the first time. Like the sudden phase out in 2011, the amendment in 2004 was spectacular and has therefore drawn the most attention, thereby skewing our understanding. While the feed-in tariffs for wind power were always below the retail rate and those for electricity from biomass were generally near it, roughly half a euro was paid for photovoltaics at the time—around three times the average retail rate in Germany at the time. These feed-in tariffs for photovoltaics led people to conflate the policy with exorbitant subsidies,2 and many prominent analysts have charged that feed-in tariffs can be done away with once grid parity (the point where power from a solar array costs the same as power from a wall socket) has been reached.3 Clearly, however, such arguments overlook the origin of feed-in tariffs for all renewables, not just photovoltaics. With the exception of photovoltaics, German feed-in tariffs have always been below the retail rate and, as seen here, they now all are—even for solar. One should think of feed-in tariffs not as a startup mechanism for the most expensive types of renewable energy, but rather as a way of protecting small investors in competition with corporations as a way of turning citizens into power producers.
A FLEDGLING MOVEMENT FROM THE 1970S If we go back to the 1970s, we discover a widespread movement across all of Germany. In that decade, people of all walks of life came together 2 See
the authorʼs rebuttal of an article in Forbes at http://www.renewablesinternational.net /a-spectacular-fail-by-command-economists/150/537/61648/. 3 See the authorʼs response to an article by Navigant’s Paula Mints in 2011: ‘Feed-in tariffs needed after grid parityʼ at http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/02/feed-intariffs-needed-after-grid-parity.
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in “Energiewende groups” to discuss how to overcome corporate control of the power sector—and hence, of their communities—by making energy themselves. Pastors, farmers, and scientists all came together to squat on the land where plants were to be built. The government responded with authoritarian force, which only increased the number of protesters until the police were overwhelmed. In 1980, three of the researchers involved in the movement published a book entitled (in German) Energiewende: Growth and Prosperity Without Petroleum and Uranium. The book stresses that distributed energy—including biomass and coal in small cogeneration units—will be “hard for large corporations to monopolize.”4 The movement focused initially on opposition to two nuclear plants, one in the south (Wyhl, which was never built) and the other in the north (Brokdorf, which was completed). From the outset, the Energiewende was thus linked to opposition to nuclear, but that opposition focused less on safety issues and more on who should get to decide what; specifically, should corporations and the government be able to tell communities they will have to accept construction of new industry? It was a democratic ground-roots uprising against authoritarian technocrats or, as one of the authors of the book from 1980 recently told the author in an interview, “our work did away with the claimed monopoly on technological competence that the energy industry used to assert: that there were no technically feasible alternatives to its ideas.” The movement led to a number of changes still visible today. For instance, German Environmental Minister Peter Altmaier approved carbon capture and storage (CCS) in 2012 contingent upon the consent of nearby communities. The international press reported the news as a compromise that would step up CCS “on a test basis,”5 but in fact Altmaier himself saw the decision as the death knoll for CCS: “We cannot store carbon dioxide underground against the will of the population. And I do not see any political acceptance in a single German state for CCS.”6 The experience has been the same with conventional coal power. As German environmental nongovernmental organization Klima-Allianz explains, there are no federal laws that limit coal plant construction in 4 See
the author’s review of the book at http://energytransition.de/2013/03/time-for-a-coal-phaseout/. 5 See Reuters http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-27/news/sns-rt-germany-energyco2l6e8hrhgl-20120627_1_emissions-ccs-bundesrat. 6 See http://www.renewablesinternational.net/germany-rejects-new-coal/150/537/39718/.
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Figure 1 German citizens are behind most of the investments in new renewables, with the Big Four utilities only having made up less than 7% of the pie by the end of 2010.
Germany, but local community governments have the power to influence—and even reject—new coal plant projects.7 Similar restrictions will apply when Germany attempts to select a site for its final nuclear waste repository. Still, opposition to conventional energy monopolies will only get one so far—what should this electricity be replaced with? In the late 1980s, the first feed-in tariffs were implemented in three German towns, and when the policy slipped into the last day of the Bundestag’s legislative session in 1991, the conventional energy sector did not think a little bit of renewables would hurt. Even in 1994, when Germany had 3% hydropower, they still claimed that renewables could never make up more than 4% of supply8 (see Figure 1). The rest, as they say, is history. The law led to a significant ground-roots movement in wind power and, to a lesser extent, in biomass. Most projects were community owned and “organic,” as a representative of DEWI, the 7 See
http://www.die-klima-allianz.de/keine-neuen-kohlekraftwerke/hintergrund/. come a long way, baby” at http://energytransition.de/2013/03/weve-come-a-longway-baby/.
8 See “We’ve
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German organization that tallies wind statistics, once told the author, who had noticed around 2005 that the American Wind Energy Association listed wind farms by size and owner, but DEWI did not. When the author called to ask why, they said ownership is too splintered in Germany, with dozens or even hundreds of local businesses and citizens having purchased shares of projects.9 Furthermore, wind farms in Germany start off with a small number of turbines, the DEWI representative explained. A community may put up a couple of turbines, and when they run well, those who were skeptical may realize what a good investment the project was and get on board for another round of turbines a few years later.The result is diverse ownership and wind farms that look like a museum of different technologies.
THE ENERGIEWENDE TODAY By June 30, 2010, all European Union(EU) member states were required to publish their National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAP) for 2020.10 Germany’s current targets for its energy transition up to that point are essentially the same as those in the NREAP—further evidence for the Energiewende is not related to the sudden nuclear phase out of 2011 as shown in Figure 2 on German energy transition. For instance, the country aimed to have 38.6% of its electricity from renewables by the end of this decade in its NREAP. That figure has now been rounded down to 35%. Whereas the original Energiewende book from 1980 actually considers all three sectors of energy use (electricity, heat, and motor fuel), the current energy transition has been criticized for being merely an “electricity transition.” Nonetheless, Germany is well poised to reduce the demand for heat. In the early 1990s, the German-speaking world brought about Passive House, a style of architecture with ventilation heat recovery that allows homes even in the climate north of the Alps to make do with small backup heaters. Process heat can also come increasingly from waste heat, which will improve the overall efficiency of energy consumption. Moreover, the heat sector is increasingly being seen as a way of storing excess renewable power. Denmark, which has a much more ambitious target of 100% renewable energy (not just electricity), is banking on electric 9 See “Renewables
from the bottom up” at http://archive.truthout.org/article/craig-morris-renewables-from-bottom-up. 10 See http://ec.europa.eu/energy/renewables/transparency_platform/doc/dir_2009_0028_action_pl an_germany.zip
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Figure 2 As this chart shows, Germany does not have a target of 100% renewables by 2050 in any area. In fact, its most ambitious target is for the electricity sector, with power consumption to drop by 25 percentage points and renewables to make up 80% of that lower demand. In contrast, the targets for heat and transport fuel are much more modest. Source: www.energytransition.de.
heating systems, which will cut on when power production exceeds power demand, thereby offsetting natural gas and oil used for heating purposes.11 The main shortcomings are found in the transport sector. Germany has no specific roadmap for transitioning from motor fuels to some kind of renewable supply.
COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP TODAY In all likelihood, Germany will therefore reach its targets for renewable power and heat, and it will continue to do so with great citizen participation and input.The result has been a marginalization of conventional power companies that have seen their profits and market shares shrink—an outcome that confuses foreign onlookers greatly.
11 See “Electric
heaters: a way of storing excess renewable power?” at http://www.renewablesinternati onal.net/electric-heaters-a-way-of-storing-excess-renewable-power/150/537/59292/.
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For instance, Canada’s Financial Post wrote12 in 2013 that “subsidized” renewables are “getting ever nearer to destroying the business model of companies meant to invest in renewables, namely the big sector leaders such as Eon and RWE.” In fact, the German renewables’ sector has been telling conventional energy firms since the 1990s that they aim to marginalize them and offset conventional power—as mentioned previously, politicians and energy firms simply did not think it was possible. The German tradition of citizen Energiewende meetings lives on today in places such as Jühnde, which became the country’s first “bioenergy village,” and Dardesheim, home of one of the largest community-owned wind farms in the country. As the project director in Dardesheim once told the author,13 he held town meetings for years to get enough consent. Indeed, citizen participation is now considered a standard way of overcoming NIMBYism, as the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) puts it in its brochure on community wind power.14 The focus on community ownership is one reason why the BWE seems so tepid about offshore wind and so supportive of onshore wind.15 The former consists mainly of gigantic projects that can only be financed by large corporations, whereas communities in Germany have always wanted to make their own power, which doesn’t just mean not importing from abroad, but also not buying from an oligarchy of domestic corporations. Going forward, Germany is even looking into ways of expanding community ownership of energy infrastructure. At present, there is a campaign among citizens of Berlin to buy back the city’s power grid, and new power lines built across the country could also be partly opened up to citizen investors.16 Unfortunately, an attempt by a citizens’ group to own part of the Butendiek offshore wind farm did not work out, and the project has been sold to wind farm developer WPD—further evidence that offshore wind and community ownership do not go hand in hand. 12 http://business.financialpost.com/2013/01/21/germany-grapples-with-switch-to-renewables/?__
lsa=1085-837b. energy” at http://www.boell.org/downloads/Morris_GermanEnergyFreedom.pdf. 14 See http://www.wind-energie.de/sites/default/files/download/publication/community-windpower/bwe_broschuere_buergerwindparks_engl_2012_l06_final.pdf. For another example in English of one of the country’s many villages “going green,” see the PBS video entitled “Germany’s green revolution” http://video.pbs.org/video/2326679795/. 15 See the interview with BWE head Hermann Albers at http://www.renewablesinternational.net/po wer-market-design-20/150/537/59421/. 16 See “Berlin to buy back its grid” at http://www.renewablesinternational.net/berlin-to-buy-backits-grid/150/537/38111/and “German grid could open to citizen investors” at http://www.renewa blesinternational.net/german-grid-could-open-to-citizen-investors/150/537/58612/. 13 See “German
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Craig Morris
CONCLUSIONS While the task may seem daunting, Germany’s energy transition actually appears a bit unambitious when viewed from Denmark, which has even stricter targets, and the German nuclear phase out also seems quite modest compared to Austria’s decision not only to forgo domestic nuclear power, but also ban imports of nuclear power imports starting in 2015.17 But then, those who wonder whether Germany will succeed should consider how surprising the current outcome is.While many speak of exorbitant subsidies for renewables, cloudy Germany actually has the least expensive solar power in the world, with midsize solar roof arrays in Germany producing electricity at half the cost of utility-scale solar plants in sunny California—the difference is largely directly attributable to the corporate control of markets in the United States.18 The highest solar feed-in tariff paid (as of June 1, 2013, with further reductions made for new systems each month) was just 0.15 euros per kilowatt-hour, with the average retail rate at around 0.27 euros. Critics warned of industry leaving the country, but Germany continues to weather the current crisis with a healthy economy and the lowest unemployment rate since reunification two decades ago.19 Critics warned of blackouts, but Germany had the lowest number of minutes of grid downtime of any EU country in 2011 (Figure 3; data for 2012 were not available as of this writing). Critics spoke of a reliance on nuclear imports, but in 2012, Germany reached a record level of net power exports, and Germany is the only country with which nuclear-heavy France has a negative power trade balance.20 Others warned that Germany would need to export its excess (and expensive) renewable power on the cheap while it imports inexpensive conventional power at a premium, but in 2012 the value of a kilowatt-hour of
17 See
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/austria-to-discontinue-imports-of-nuclearpower/150/537/38088/. 18 See http://www.renewablesinternational.net/rfps-make-renewables-artificially-expensive/150/510/57958/. 19 See http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-germany-employment-idUSBRE91 I0V720130219. 20 See http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-energy-consumption-up-adjusted-co2-emissions-down/150/537/59443/ and http://www.renewablesinternational.net/france-net-powerexporter-except-to-germany/150/537/59937/.
Germany’s Energiewende: Community-Driven Since the 1970s
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Figure 3 Germany had the most reliable grid in the EU in terms of minutes of downtime excluding natural disasters.
electricity Germany exported was roughly 7% above the value of the average kilowatt-hour imported.21 Indeed, it seems that just about all of the expectations that critics of the Energiewende had have turned out to be unfounded, at least as of this writing. Perhaps that is because these critics have not done one crucial thing that Germans do: pay attention to the macroeconomic impact of the switch from corporate-owned conventional energy to community-owned renewables on their national economy.
21 See
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-more-valuable-than-impo rts/150/537/61663/.