A few years ago, the small rural town of Feldheim decided to become energy self-sufficient. With rising energy costs in a village where the temperature can drop to below -10 Centigrade, it made economic sense. And so the townsfolk each paid EUR 3,000 for a share in a community company that would eventually own and run their electricity grid. The long-standing agricultural co-op owns the heating network.
Their crops are surrounded by 43 wind turbines, built and run by a renewable energy company that partners with the community-owned firm. The small town only needs the equivalent of one turbine’s worth of electricity. The surplus energy is sold into the grid. On the odd occasion where there isn’t enough wind power, a small biogas plant within the village provides it.
Throughout all this, not one person has ever complained of any adverse effects from wind turbines. Despite the rhetoric in Australia, health has never come up as an issue. A small few in Germany complain about the sight of windfarms, but not the folks from Feldheim. Why not? Well, as our guide told us, your own pigs don’t stink. Whatever complaints others might have, the folks here are proud of what they’ve got in their backyard.
Maybe we need more of this in Australia. Maybe more locally owned energy production will help dispel some of the rubbish arguments used to justify, for example, Victoria’s ludicrous anti-windfarm laws. Maybe then the existing public support for renewables will translate into the nationwide action we need.
Renata Kunast (r) now leads a …party that includes members such as Herman Ott (l) and Hans-Josef Fell, an author of the country’s “feed-in tariff” laws, central to Germany’s ‘energy transformation’.
Under a ‘feed-in tariff’ law, you get a guaranteed amount of money for the renewable electricity you put into the grid. This enables private households, farmers, banks and others to invest in renewable energy on their land, knowing the’ll get a guaranteed return on their initial outlay.
As a result of this Greens-driven legislation, wind turbines now dot the countryside. One electricity company we visited this morning, which services about a quarter of the country, gets almost a third of all its energy from wind alone.
Amazingly, 70% of wind power here is community owned. Individuals or groups of people get together and install a turbine, and it’s taken off like wildfire. In Australia, the excellent Hepburn Wind -http://hepburnwind.com.au/ - is leading the way in regional Victoria, but a national feed-in tariff could see a similar growth of ‘people power’ in our country.
The windows you see are triple glazed. The facade is mainly wooden, not brick, with the space freed up stuffed full of insulation… instead. As a result, they’ve cut heating bills by 80%.
Ventilation is primarily natural, with no air-conditioning. On a 33 degree day last summer, it was only 25 degrees inside before turning on a fan.
You’d think it would cost more to do it like this. Not so. The whole thing, built from scratch, including land, cost about €2,180 per square metres. Similar apartments in the area go for €2,800/sq m.
Cheaper construction, cheaper living and a great communal feel inside, it’s setting the standard for new regulations in parts of the country. Anyone know of anything similar in Australia?
In such a highly regulated country, I’m amazed that the thing shown in this photo exists. It surely breaks every OHS law ever created. It’s a constantly moving doorless two person lift, that you jump into and out of as it arrives at each floor. This particular one (it’s got a specific name, which sadly escapes me) took us to the top floor of the German Foreign Office, sponsors of this trip, in a building that formerly housed the central committee of East Germany’s ruling party.
Germany is on a mission to be energy independent, we learned, with renewables set to make up 60% of all electricity production (and 80% of energy use) by 2050. These folks (http://ecologic.eu/) think that with the current rate of technological development, renewables could 100% power the country by as early as 2035.
Just pause on that for a moment. An advanced, manufacturing based country running on renewables in just over 20 years.
What about baseload power? These people (http://kombikraftwerk.de/) created a ‘virtual’ renewable energy plant by mapping the output of a number of existing renewable plants of different kinds over a number years. They demonstrated that these power stations put together would have provided baseload over that time.
And by 2022, even if the current subsidies for renewables (the feed-in tariff) are phased out, the wholesale cost of solar energy will be at parity with the rest of the energy supply. Amazing.
Looking at this graph, presented to us by the Economics Ministry, it’s pretty clear that Germany plans a massive expansion of renewables by 2030. That dotted line - and the fossil fuel use represented under it - is only going in one direction.
But significantly, the size of the bars themselves are also going down. That’s because the country’s total energy use is going down in coming decades. Yep, going down. In fact, with the country’s energy efficiency measures kicking in, total energy use is already decreasing.
At the same time, their GDP is rising. Rising economic growth, it seems, has been decoupled from rising energy use.
This polar bear is looking pretty satisfied with itself. It’s probably heard what one of the country’s biggest energy companies told us today about new laws here. If you build, say, a wind farm, the operator of the state energy grid is obliged to connect you, so that you can feed your energy into the system.
‘The grid’ is a big issue in Germany at the moment. Most of the country’s future renewables will come from offshore wind farms. But the best areas are in the seas to the north of the country, and there are as yet no good transmission lines to the south. So there’s a big debate about how to fund and build these new power lines.
We’re going to have to have the same debate in Australia soon. Our grid is basically a set of power lines out to coal mines. The lines don’t necessarily run to where renewable energy is the most plentiful.
That’s why we negotiated as part of the climate change package that Australia’s energy regulator must start mapping out what our grid would look like to support 100% renewables. Something to make a polar bear feel even more smug.
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This probably isn’t the future of electric mobility. At least, I hope not.
But we’re going to have think much more seriously about how we’ll get around in a zero emissions world. For me, we need to do at least three things in our cities.
First, we need to make our cities bike-safe and bike-centric. Second, we need to create world-class public transport cities instead of spending billions on roads and tollways. Third, we need to make the remaining cars run on renewable energy.
At Hannover’s energy fair, it became apparent just how much diverse research is being done around the world on cities and mobility, from urban planning to electric charging stations to hydrogen fuel cells. What would you do to keep us mobile while fighting climate change?
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Nice to meet you.
We are so excited to be launching Adam’s new Tumblr today.
We’re excited because like the other platforms we already use, like Google+, Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr will enable us to have a conversation. Using Tumblr’s ask and submission features you will be able to share your own photos and stories related to our important campaigns and events. You can also ask questions both of staff and of Adam himself so you can get informed about issues in Melbourne and across the country and how Adam is working to resolve them.
We can’t wait to get this conversation started. So why don’t you click that submit button there and tell us something about yourself and why you support Adam and The Greens?
First up Adam is going to share with you some photos and stories from Berlin where he is learning about their shift to clean energy.
Thanks, Tumblr. We’re looking forward to getting to know you.
