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Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future - National
Geographic Magazine

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/climate-change/germany-renewable-energy-revolution-text

Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future

How Do We Fix It?
<http://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/special-issue/#howtofixit>
The
European nation’s energy revolution has made it a leader in replacing nukes
and fossil fuels with wind and solar technology.

By *Robert Kunzig*

Photographs by *Luca Locatelli*

Published October 15, 2015

Hamburg knew the bombs were coming, and so the prisoners of war and forced
laborers had just half a year to build the giant flak bunker. By July 1943
it was finished. A windowless cube of reinforced concrete, with
seven-foot-thick walls and an even thicker roof, it towered like a medieval
castle above a park near the Elbe River. The guns protruding from its four
turrets would sweep Allied bombers from the sky, the Nazis promised, while
tens of thousands of citizens sheltered safely behind its impenetrable
walls.

Coming in at night from the North Sea just weeks after the bunker was
finished, British bombers steered for the spire of St. Nikolai in the
center of the city. They dropped clouds of metallic foil strips to throw
off German radar and flak gunners. Targeting crowded residential
neighborhoods, the bombers ignited an unquenchable firestorm that destroyed
half of Hamburg and killed more than 34,000 people. Towering walls of fire
created winds so strong that people were blown into the flames. Church
bells clanged furiously.

The spire of St. Nikolai, which somehow survived, stands today as a
*mahnmal—*a memorial reminding Germany of the hell brought by the Nazis.
The flak bunker is another mahnmal. But now it has a new meaning: An urban
development agency (IBA Hamburg) and the municipal utility (Hamburg
Energie) have transformed it from a powerful reminder of Germany’s shameful
past into a hopeful vision for the future.

In the central space of the bunker, where people once cowered through the
firestorm, a six-story, 528,000-gallon hot water tank delivers heat and hot
water to some 800 homes in the neighborhood. The water is warmed by burning
gas from sewage treatment, by waste heat from a nearby factory, and by
solar panels that now cover the roof of the bunker, supported by struts
angling from the old gun turrets. The bunker also converts sunlight into
electricity; a scaffolding of photovoltaic (PV) panels on its south facade
feeds enough juice into the grid to supply a thousand homes. On the north
parapet, from which the flak gunners once watched flames rising from the
city center, an outdoor café offers a view of the changed skyline. It’s
dotted with 17 wind turbines now.
[image: Picture of the windmills in Germany]

Wind turbines surround a coal-fired power plant near Garzweiler in western
Germany. Renewables now generate 27 percent of the country’s electricity,
up from 9 percent a decade ago. Eventually they’ll crowd out coal—although
Germany is switching off its nuclear plants first.

Germany is pioneering an epochal transformation it calls the *energiewende—*an
energy revolution that scientists say all nations must one day complete if
a climate disaster is to be averted. Among large industrial nations,
Germany is a leader. Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came
from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it
got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today. The
change accelerated after the 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear
power plant, which led Chancellor Angela Merkel to declare that Germany
would shut all 17 of its own reactors by 2022. Nine have been switched off
so far, and renewables have more than picked up the slack.

What makes Germany so important to the world, however, is the question of
whether it can lead the retreat from fossil fuels. By later this century,
scientists say, planet-warming carbon emissions must fall to virtually
zero. Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has promised some of the
most aggressive emission cuts—by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels,
and by 2050, at least 80 percent.

What makes Germany so important, however, is the question of whether it can
lead the retreat from fossil fuels.

The fate of those promises hangs in the balance right now. The German
revolution has come from the grass roots: Individual citizens and energy
*genossenschaften—*local citizens associations—have made half the
investment in renewables. But conventional utilities, which didn’t see the
revolution coming, are pressuring Merkel’s government to slow things down.
The country still gets far more electricity from coal than from renewables.
And the energiewende has an even longer way to go in the transportation and
heating sectors, which together emit more carbon dioxide (CO₂) than power
plants.

German politicians sometimes compare the energiewende to the Apollo moon
landing. But that feat took less than a decade, and most Americans just
watched it on TV. The energiewende will take much longer and will involve
every single German—more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the
population, are selling electricity to the grid right now. “It’s a project
for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,”
said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at *Der Spiegel* who’s now an
analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making
electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask
people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”

Why? I wondered as I traveled in Germany last spring. Why is the energy
future happening here, in a country that was a bombed-out wasteland 70
years ago? And could it happen everywhere?

The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and
impenetrable heart of the forest. It dates back to the Roman historian
Tacitus, who wrote about the Teutonic hordes who massacred Roman legions,
and it was embellished by German Romantics in the 19th century. Through the
upheavals of the 20th century, according to ethnographer Albrecht Lehmann,
the myth remained a stable source of German identity. The forest became the
place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them
to care about the environment.

So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing
German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo
of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their
own, think about energy. The threat of *waldsterben,* or forest death, made
them think harder.
[image: Picture of an abandoned nuclear facility in Germany]
[image: Picture of a man dismantling a nuclear facility in Germany]

Workers have been taking apart this Soviet-era nuclear power plant, near
Greifswald in eastern Germany, since 1995, cleaning radioactive surfaces
with steel grit so the metal can be recycled. Germany plans to shut all its
reactors by 2022.

Government and utilities were pushing nuclear power—but many Germans were
pushing back. This was new for them. In the decades after World War II,
with a ruined country to rebuild, there had been little appetite for
questioning authority or the past. But by the 1970s, the rebuilding was
complete, and a new generation was beginning to question the one that had
started and lost the war. “There’s a certain rebelliousness that’s a result
of the Second World War,” a 50-something man named Josef Pesch told me.
“You don’t blindly accept authority.”

Pesch was sitting in a mountaintop restaurant in the Black Forest outside
Freiburg. In a snowy clearing just uphill stood two 320-foot-tall wind
turbines funded by 521 citizen investors recruited by Pesch—but we weren’t
talking about the turbines yet. With an engineer named Dieter Seifried, we
were talking about the nuclear reactor that never got built, near the
village of Wyhl, 20 miles away on the Rhine River.

The state government had insisted that the reactor had to be built or the
lights would go out in Freiburg. But beginning in 1975, local farmers and
students occupied the site. In protests that lasted nearly a decade, they
forced the government to abandon its plans. It was the first time a nuclear
reactor had been stopped in Germany.

The lights didn’t go out, and Freiburg became a solar city. Its branch of
the Fraunhofer Institute is a world leader in solar research. Its Solar
Settlement, designed by local architect Rolf Disch, who’d been active in
the Wyhl protests, includes 50 houses that all produce more energy than
they consume. “Wyhl was the starting point,” Seifried said. In 1980 an
institute that Seifried co-founded published a study called
*Energiewende—*giving
a name to a movement that hadn’t even been born yet.
[image: Picture of a dismantled nuclear facility turned into a theme park
in Germany]

A nuclear reactor at Kalkar was finished just before the 1986 explosion at
Chernobyl, Ukraine—and never used. It’s now an amusement park with a ride
in what would have been the cooling tower. Fear of nuclear power spurred
Germany’s transition.

It wasn’t born of a single fight. But opposition to nuclear power, at a
time when few people were talking about climate change, was clearly a
decisive factor. I had come to Germany thinking the Germans were foolish to
abandon a carbon-free energy source that, until Fukushima, produced a
quarter of their electricity. I came away thinking there would have been no
energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a
much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising
temperatures and seas.

All over Germany I heard the same story. From Disch, sitting in his own
cylindrical house, which rotates to follow the sun like a sunflower. From
Rosenkranz in Berlin, who back in 1980 left physics graduate school for
months to occupy the site of a proposed nuclear waste repository. From
Luise Neumann-Cosel, who occupied the same site two decades later—and who
is now leading a citizens’ initiative to buy the Berlin electric grid. And
from Wendelin Einsiedler, a Bavarian dairy farmer who has helped transform
his village into a green dynamo.

All of them said Germany had to get off nuclear power and fossil fuels at
the same time. “You can’t drive out the devil with Beelzebub,” explained
Hans-Josef Fell, a prominent Green Party politician. “Both have to go.” At
the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, energy researcher Volker
Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate
change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”
Germany has Europe’s second highest consumer electricity prices, yet public
support for its energiewende—an aggressive transition to renewable
energy—is at an impressive 92 percent. The support is rooted in an
eco-friendly culture, a collective desire to abandon nuclear energy, and
laws that allow citizens to profit from selling their energy to the grid.
Roughly 27 percent of Germany’s electricity is from renewables; the goal is
at least 80 percent by 2050.
Solar and Wind Energy in Germany
Installed capacity by postal code area, megawatts per square mile
OFFSHORE WIND FARM AREAS ALSO SHOWN
Operational nuclear reactor
[image: Map of Power Generation in Germany, 2014]
On July 25, 2015, it was very windy in the north and sunny in the south.
For a few hours renewables yielded about three-quarters of Germany’s
electricity.
After the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, Germany vowed to quickly
abandon nuclear energy. Of 17 operable reactors, nine have since been
shuttered. The rest are set to close by 2022.
**Reactor closed prior to 2011
[image: Map of Power Generation in Germany, 2050]
Germany has invested heavily in energy generated by offshore wind and
expects one-third of its future wind energy to come from offshore farms.
To bring renewable power from the windy north to the heavily industrialized
south, government and utilities have proposed at least two high-voltage,
direct current (HVDC) power lines. Landowners and even the Bavarian
government are resisting the unsightly lines. A possible compromise:
running some stretches of cable underground.
The government has boosted renewables by paying producers for energy and
guaranteeing prices.
[image: Renewables as share of electricty generation]
Germany's renewable-energy surge has contributed to a 27 percent reduction
in its greenhouse gas emissions.
[image: Total emissions (CO2 equivalent), 1990-2012]
JASON TREAT, NG STAFF; EVAN APPLEGATE
SOURCES: FRAUNHOFER IWES, KASSEL; U.S. ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION;
GERMAN FEDERAL MINISTRY FOR THE ENVIRONMENT; EUROSTAT

If you ask why antinuclear sentiment has been so much more consequential in
Germany than, say, across the Rhine in France, which still gets 75 percent
of its electricity from nukes, you end up back at the war. It left Germany
a divided country, the front along which two nuclear superpowers faced off.
Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear
reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The
two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980,
pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.

In 1983 the first Green representatives made it into the Bundestag, the
national parliament, and started injecting green ideas into the political
mainstream. When the Soviet reactor at Chernobyl exploded in 1986, the
left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), one of Germany’s two major parties,
was converted to the antinuclear cause. Even though Chernobyl was hundreds
of miles away, its radioactive cloud passed over Germany, and parents were
urged to keep their children inside. It’s still not always safe to eat
mushrooms or wild boar from the Black Forest, Pesch said. Chernobyl was a
watershed.

But it took Fukushima, 25 years later, to convince Merkel and her Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) that all nuclear reactors should be switched off by
2022. By then the boom of renewable energy was in full swing. And a law
that Hans-Josef Fell had helped create back in 2000 was the main reason.

Fell’s house in Hammelburg, the town in northern Bavaria where he was born
and raised, is easy to spot among all the pale postwar stucco: It’s the one
built of dark larch wood, with a grass roof. On the south side, facing the
backyard, the grass is partially covered by photovoltaic and solar hot
water panels. When there’s not enough sun to produce electricity or heat, a
cogenerator in the basement burns sunflower or rapeseed oil to produce
both. On the March morning when I visited, the wood interior of the house
was bathed in sunlight and warmth from the conservatory. In a few weeks,
Fell said, wildflowers would be blooming on the roof.

A tall man in jeans and Birkenstocks, with a bald, egg-shaped head and a
fringe of gray beard, Fell has moments of sounding like a preacher—but he’s
no green ascetic. A shed in his backyard, next to the swimming pond, houses
a sauna, powered by the same green electricity that powers his house and
his car. “The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do
less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate
that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap,
renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”

See how German citizens are preparing for more renewable energy industries.

From Fell’s garden, on a clear day, you used to be able to see the white
steam plumes of the nuclear reactor at Grafenrheinfeld. His father, the
conservative mayor of Hammelburg, supported nuclear power and the local
military base. Young Fell demonstrated at Grafenrheinfeld and went to court
to refuse military service. Years later, after his father had retired, Fell
was elected to the Hammelburg city council.

It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the
country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the
energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice.
Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of
renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities
had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the
windy north.

But Fell, who was installing PV panels on his roof in Hammelburg, realized
that the new law would never lead to a countrywide boom: It paid people to
produce energy, but not enough. In 1993 he got the city council to pass an
ordinance obliging the municipal utility to guarantee any renewable energy
producer a price that more than covered costs. Fell promptly organized an
association of local investors to build a 15-kilowatt solar power
plant—tiny by today’s standards, but the association was one of the first
of its kind. Now there are hundreds in Germany.

In 1998 Fell rode a Green wave and his success in Hammelburg into the
Bundestag. The Greens formed a governing coalition with the SPD. Fell
teamed up with Hermann Scheer, a prominent SPD advocate of solar energy, to
craft a law that in 2000 took the Hammelburg experiment nationwide and has
since been imitated around the world. Its feed-in tariffs were guaranteed
for 20 years, and they paid well.

“My basic principle,” Fell said, “was the payment had to be so high that
investors could make a profit. We live in a market economy, after all. It’s
logical.”
[image: Picture of a coal field in Germany]

Renewables are booming, but Germany’s use of lignite, the dirtiest coal,
hasn’t declined. At Vattenfall’s Welzow-Süd mine, some of the world’s
largest machines claw 22 million tons a year from a 45-foot-thick seam. How
long will that go on? “Very long, I hope,” said Jan Domann, a young
engineer. “We have enough lignite.”

Fell was about the only German I met who claimed not to have been surprised
at the boom his logic unleashed. “That it would be possible to this
extent—I didn’t believe that then,” said dairy farmer Wendelin Einsiedler.
Outside his sunroom, which overlooks the Alps, nine wind turbines turned
lazily on the ridge behind the cow pen. The smell of manure drifted in.
Einsiedler had started his personal energiewende in the 1990s with a single
turbine and a methane-producing manure fermenter. He and his brother Ignaz,
also a dairy farmer, burned the methane in a 28-kilowatt cogenerator,
generating heat and electricity for their farms. “There was no question of
making money,” Einsiedler said. “It was idealism.”

But after the renewable energy law took effect in 2000, the Einsiedlers
expanded. Today they have five fermenters, which process corn silage as
well as manure from eight dairy farms, and they pipe the resulting biogas
three miles to the village of Wildpoldsried. There it’s burned in
cogenerators to heat all the public buildings, an industrial park, and 130
homes. “It’s a wonderful principle, and it saves an unbelievable amount of
CO₂,” said Mayor Arno Zengerle.

The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind
turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much
electricity as it consumes. Einsiedler manages the turbines, and he’s had
little trouble recruiting investors. Thirty people invested in the first
one; 94 jumped on the next. “These are their wind turbines,” Einsiedler
said. Wind turbines are a dramatic and sometimes controversial addition to
the German landscape—“asparagification,” opponents call it—but when people
have a financial stake in the asparagus, Einsiedler said, their attitude
changes.
<http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/explorer/>

It wasn’t hard to persuade farmers and homeowners to put solar panels on
their roofs; the feed-in tariff, which paid them 50 cents a kilowatt-hour
when it started in 2000, was a good deal. At the peak of the boom, in 2012,
7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the
equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German
solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost
manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide.

Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them
competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s
tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a
kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in
15 years—that’s the huge success of the renewable energy law,” Fell said.

Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a
renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the
surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average
customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some, Rosenkranz
told me, but not for the average German worker. The German economy as a
whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as
it did in 1991.

In the 2013 elections Fell lost his seat in the Bundestag, a victim of
internal Green Party politics. He’s back in Hammelburg now, but he doesn’t
have to look at the steam plumes from Grafenrheinfeld: Last June the
reactor became the latest to be switched off. No one, not even the
industry, thinks nuclear is coming back in Germany. Coal is another story.
[image: Picture of a plane over solar panels]

A sea of photovoltaic panels surrounds the runway at the Eberswalde-Finow
Airport, 30 miles north of Berlin. Germany is at the same latitude as
Labrador, Canada, but has installed more solar capacity than any other
country. Most panels are on rooftops.

Germany got 44 percent of its electricity from coal last year—18 percent
from hard coal, which is mostly imported, and about 26 percent from
lignite, or brown coal. The use of hard coal has declined substantially
over the past two decades, but not the use of lignite. That’s a major
reason Germany isn’t on track to meet its own greenhouse gas emissions
target for 2020.

Germany is the world’s leading producer of lignite. It emits even more CO₂
than hard coal, but it’s the cheapest fossil fuel—cheaper than hard coal,
which is cheaper than natural gas. Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany
should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid,
something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to
deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has
plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants
burning hard coal are priced out of the market. Old lignite-fired power
plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired
plants with half the emissions are standing idle.

“Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very
obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment
ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich
country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”
[image: Picture of the cliffside in Germany]

The chalk cliffs at Jasmund National Park on the Baltic have drawn tourists
for centuries. The beech woods there are a remnant of the forest that once
covered Germany. According to Romantic lore, the forest forged the German
identity as a nature-loving people—a key inspiration for the clean-energy
movement. When a quarry threatened this site in the 1920s, ranger Rico
Markmann explains, “the populace didn’t stand for it.”

Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities
have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say;
because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics.
E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other
plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.

“The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was
to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”
Having missed the energiewende train as it left the station, they’re now
chasing it. E.ON is splitting into two companies, one devoted to coal, gas,
and nuclear, the other to renewables. The CEO, once a critic of the
energiewende, is going with the renewables.

Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned company that’s another one of Germany’s
four big utilities, is attempting a similar evolution. “We’re a role model
for the energiewende,” spokesperson Lutz Wiese said cheerfully as he
greeted me at Welzow-Süd—an open-pit mine on the Polish border that
produces 22 million tons of lignite a year. In a trench that covers 11
square miles and is more than 300 feet deep, 13 gargantuan digging machines
work in synchrony—moving the trench through the landscape, exposing and
removing the lignite seam, and dumping the overburden behind them so the
land can be replanted. In one recultivated area there’s a small
experimental vineyard. On the same rebuilt hill stands a memorial to
Wolkenberg, a village consumed by the mine in the 1990s. Boulders mark the
spots where the church and other buildings once stood.

It was a gorgeous spring day; from Wolkenberg, the only cloud we could see
was the lazily billowing steam plume from the 1.6-gigawatt power plant at
Schwarze Pumpe, which burns most of the lignite mined at Welzow-Süd. In a
conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite
operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never
expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of
more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.
[image: Picture of a people riding segways in Germany]

Citizens have funded half of Germany’s investment in renewable energy after
a law made it profitable. Outside the village of Feldheim, visitors tour
the wind park. It sells electricity to the national grid—but also supplies
a local grid that makes Feldheim self-sufficient.

“We have to face some kind of a market cleaning,” Adermann said. But
lignite shouldn’t be the one to go, he insisted: It’s the “reliable and
flexible partner” when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Adermann, who’s from the region and worked for its lignite mines before
they belonged to Vattenfall, sees them continuing to 2050—and maybe beyond.

Vattenfall, however, plans to sell its lignite business, if it can find a
buyer, so it can focus on renewables. It’s investing billions of euros in
two new offshore wind parks in the North Sea—because there’s more wind
offshore than on and because a large corporation needs a large project to
pay its overhead. “We can’t do onshore in Germany,” Wiese said. “It’s too
small.”

Vattenfall isn’t alone: The renewables boom has moved into the North and
Baltic Seas and, increasingly, into the hands of the utilities. Merkel’s
government has encouraged the shift, capping construction of solar and
onshore wind and changing the rules in ways that shut out citizens
associations. Last year the amount of new solar fell to around 1.9
gigawatts, a quarter of the 2012 peak. Critics say the government is
helping big utilities at the expense of the citizens’ movement that
launched the energiewende.

At the end of April, Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North
Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles
offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the
city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49
percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable
electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it
plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.

In part because it has retained a lot of heavy industry, Germany has some
of the highest per capita carbon emissions in western Europe. (They’re a
bit more than half of U.S. emissions.) Its goal for 2020 is to cut them by
40 percent from 1990 levels. As of last year, it had achieved 27 percent.
The European carbon-trading system, in which governments issue tradable
emissions permits to polluters, hasn’t been much help so far. There are too
many permits in circulation, and they’re so cheap that industry has little
incentive to cut emissions.

Though Germany isn’t on track to meet its own goal for 2020, it’s ahead of
the European Union’s schedule. It could have left things there—and many in
Merkel’s CDU wanted her to do just that. Instead, she and Economics
Minister Sigmar Gabriel, head of the SPD, reaffirmed their 40 percent
commitment last fall.

They haven’t proved they can meet it, however. Last spring Gabriel proposed
a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had
15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers,
demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down.
Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a
few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the
energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.
[image: Picture of a dismantled nuclear facility turned theme park]

In 1996 the Kalkar nuclear reactor site, on the Rhine near Holland, opened
as an amusement park: Wunderland Kalkar. By 2050 Germany aims to be a new
kind of wonderland—an industrial country that uses half as much energy as
before and gets at least 80 percent from renewables.

It will have to get off gasoline and diesel too. The transportation sector
produces about 17 percent of Germany’s emissions. Like the utilities, its
famous carmakers—Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and Audi—were late to the
energiewende. But today they’re offering more than two dozen models of
electric cars. The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on
the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that
the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government
hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for
transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.

Much the same is true of buildings, whose heating systems emit 30 percent
of Germany’s greenhouse gases. Rolf Disch in Freiburg is one of many
architects who have built houses and buildings that consume almost no net
energy or produce a surplus. But Germany is not putting up many new
buildings. “The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such
a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with
renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute.
“That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not
enough.”

All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam
insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the
bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for
many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year,
though. For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official
goal—the rate would need to double at least. Once, Sandrock said, the
government floated the idea of requiring homeowners to renovate. The public
outcry shot that trial balloon down.

“After Fukushima, for a short time there was *aufbruchstimmung—*for about
half a year there was a real euphoria,” said Gerd Rosenkranz.
Aufbruchstimmung means something like “the joy of departure”; it’s what a
German feels when he’s setting out on a long hike, say, in the company of
friends. With all the parties in Germany in agreement, Rosenkranz said, the
energiewende felt like that. But the feeling hasn’t lasted. Economic
interests are clashing now. Some Germans say it might take another
catastrophe like Fukushima to catalyze a fresh burst of progress. “The mood
is bad,” Rosenkranz said.

They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and
yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them?

But here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was
never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What
can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear
power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing
projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago,
and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago.
But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for
other countries too.

In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades
studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he
considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and
doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and
hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders,
Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing,
it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.
How Solar Lanterns Are Giving Power to the People
<http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/climate-change/solar-power-text>

Photographer and filmmaker *Luca Locatelli,* who lives in Milan, is
passionate about the relationship between humans and technology—and the
environmental consequences of those interactions.

*How did you prepare for this assignment?*
The biggest challenge was training to join the offshore-wind-park
technicians. I spent three days learning to cope with hazardous situations
at sea—like when a helicopter is upside down underwater, how to break a
window to escape.

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Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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