Will Germany kill its energy golden goose?

Will Germany kill the goose laying the golden eggs?    Germany is understandably proud of its renewable energy sector — wind and solar power supply more than 15 percent of the country’s electricity. Its Renewable Energy Act (EEG) has fuelled its rapid growth over the past decade and been copied by more than 40 countries around the world.    But is the party over?    A new centre-right government announced plans to slash the EEG’s guaranteed feed-in tariffs (FIT) that utilities are required to pay the myriad of producers of solar energy, many of whom feed the modest amounts of solar power from their roofs into the local grid. The EEG already foresees a FIT decline of about 10 percent per year — a built-in incentive to keep overall costs falling.    Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen wants an additional 15 percent cut in April on top of the 10 percent from Jan. 1, 2010 and ahead of the next 10-percent cut on Jan. 1, 2011. In the past decade, the previous two environment ministers from the Greens party and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) worked closely with the solar industry before making changes.    Roettgen made it clear those days of compromise were over. He said he spoke to solar firms last week before proposing the cuts, but rejected their offer to a one-off mid-2010 cut of 5 percent. “This is not a compromise,” he told journalists in Berlin on Wednesday. “It’s a bullseye.”  He said the cuts would save consumers about 1 billion euros a year over the next decade. Consumer groups and some industry groups had wanted deeper cuts, Roettgen noted.    Solar companies in Germany, which have until now worked closely with the government on reducing the tariffs the utilities pay to producers of green electricity, criticised the cuts which amount to about 35 percent within 13 months. They fear they will cripple the sector and kill jobs. Roettgen said he wants solar power, which now generates about 1 percent of Germany’s electricity, to be providing 4 to 5 percent by 2020 even though the support is being slashed by one-third in the course of 13 months. He portrayed the cuts as if he were doing the industry a favour.     Several leading German companies — such as SolarWorld, Q-Cells and Solon — said there were dark days ahead for the solar industry. They pointed out that prices, and support, were already falling steadily and would reach grid parity by the middle of the decade. Why, they asked, ruin a good thing? Frank Asbeck, CEO of Germany’s biggest solar company by revenue SolarWorld, called the plans unacceptable. As my colleague Christoph Steitz reported here, the cuts would cause problems for solar companies around the world.    Carsten Koernig, managing director of the BSW solar industry lobby, said “a radical cut like that will rob German companies of the foundation for business”.    Claudia Kemfert, an energy policy expert at the independent DIW economic research institute, said: “This level of 15 percent is quite problematic. It means a 25 percent cut within a few months and I consider that to be too much. It’s going to hit the small and medium sized companies very hard. It’s going to bring a lot of uncertainty into the market.”    The German Renewable Energy Association also used strong language, saying: “The radical cuts endanger the expansion of renewable energy.”

Is it a done deal? It’s hard to say at this point. There could be a lot of resistance from key conservative-ruled states such as Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg. They have important solar power industries and in the past succeeded in watering down attempts to cut the FIT.

German Greens at 30, world’s No. 1 green party

Germany’s Greens party celebrated their 30th birthday on Wednesday.

The world’s most successful environmental party spent seven of those 30 years as junior partner in the government of one of the world’s biggest industrial nations and are now part of three state governments. They were the driving force behind the country’s Renewable Energy Act (EEG) 10 years ago that has made Germany the world’s leader in wind energy and photovoltaic and the world’s first major renewable-energy economy — laws promoting the development of renewable energy that led to the creation of some 280,000 jobs in the last decade.

Despite their rather chaotic and inauspicious start on Jan. 13, 1980, the Greens have matured into one of Germany’s major political forces and formed a centre-left government with the Social Democrats in 1998 — even though they ended up on the opposition benches again in 2005. An opinion poll published in Stern magazine today showed 63 percent of Germans believe the Greens are indispensible.

The Greens won 10.7 percent of the vote in September federal election, their highest score ever. They would win 14 percent of the vote if an election were held this Sunday, the Stern poll also found. That makes them the third largest party in Germany at the moment. But more important than their seats in the federal, state and local assemblies, the Greens have become an established force in Germany with clout that goes far beyond their numbers.

Can science and politics mix in Copenhagen?

As a trained physicist, Angela Merkel knows scientific findings and political negotiations don’t always mix well.

So the German Chancellor, who has no doubts about the scientific evidence of climate change, is going with a somewhat uneasy feeling to the climate conference in Copenhagen, where negotiations are taking place for something that she thinks should be non-negotiable: fighting global warming.

“Limiting a rise in temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius is an ambitious target but it’s absolutely necessary to reach that target,” she told a group of foreign journalists in the chancellery, which is covered with 1,300-square metres of solar panels producing nearly 150,000 kWh of electricity per year. “Because if global temperatures do rise above 2 degrees there will be a need for adaptation and there will be reactions that will be not only enormously expensive but far more difficult to manage.”

Merkel, who has a doctorate and worked at East Germany’s Academy of Sciences for 12 years before entering politics in 1990,  said it is infinitely more difficult to reach a comprehensive agreement on fighting climate change than on many other issues because there are so many different countries with so many different interests involved. She doesn’t envy hosts Denmark.

But will they get the message?

They came from as far away as Taiwan, Hawaii, South America and South Africa and they ranged from toothless toddlers to gray-haired grannies as they all shivered together in Copenhagen on Saturday. They spoke in countless different languages but the 30,000 activists marching  all had the same message: Act now on climate change.

Their hope is that the delegates to the Climate Conference — and more importantly the world leaders due in town later next week — will get that message.

“Bla Bla Bla. Act Now!” was the ubiquitous slogan on one popular placard. “There is no planet B“, “Change the politics, not the climate“, “Obama — get your head out of the Bush” and “Earth in Need. Delete Meat” were some of the other messages on posters and placards. My favourite was a simple hand-painted sign: “Make Copenhagen a name our children will remember“.

Sleeping next to activists in Copenhagen

There’s no concierge, no bellboy nor even a check-in counter. There’s no lobby, nor mini-bar and not even any heating. But despite the lack of amenities there was still something special about sleeping alongside 2,000 other climate change activists in an empty warehouse in an industrial section of northwest Copenhagen last night. 

It’s cold, loud and dusty. But the price is unbeatable and so is the atmosphere. You could say they were all happy campers.

There’s no charge but donations are welcome. There’s even breakfast available, a delicious porridge concoction.  And even free wireless, which is helping me get this post written.  Last night I managed to find a fairly empty corner on the cold cement floor of this drafty warehouse shortly before midnight but by the time I woke up at 7 a.m. there were hundreds more activists in sleeping bags crowded around me. They had been streaming in through the night.

One of the organisers just announced that there were 500 more activists from Britain due to arrive within the next few hours. “So could you please try to make some space for them by moving your sleeping bags together,” he said through a megaphone.

Packed train beats cheap plane to Copenhagen

Imagine standing packed inside a commuter train with a thousand other people, some in dire need of a shower, some apparently having eaten garlic for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Imagine your fingertips clinging to a metal overhead rack as you struggle to stay upright on turns and bumps in the track. And then imagine doing that for hours on end.

That’s what the train trip from Berlin to Copenhagen today was like as some 45,000 demonstrators converged on the Danish capital for Saturday’s march. But the journey was still a lot of fun — and we saw a myriad of wind turbines in both northern Germany and southwestern Denmark turning in the breeze, and thousands more roof-top photovoltaic systems extracting what little daylight they could out of the mid-December sky.

Fortunately, most of the people headed to the demonstration were in a fabulous mood. And there was even a happy ending to the ride — for the last two hours of the trip, in Denmark, an extra four carriages were added so just about everyone ended up getting a seat for the final third of the ride from Berlin, via Hamburg and a short ferry-hop.

Before that, the train was so full of German, Italian, French and Dutch demonstrators that the conductor didn’t bother to check for tickets, and the border guards gave up before they even started. “Forget it Heinrich,” one German border guard said to his colleague. “It’s too full. Just stay where you are.” They got off at the next stop without checking anyone’s passport.

What will they say in 2100 about what (didn’t) happen in 2009?

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber can speak eloquently and at length in English, German, French or Spanish about the perils of climate change. But the cold language of science in any of those languages melts away when the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 59, mentions his 18-month-old son and the impact that global warming will have on  the toddler’s life. 

“I’ve got a young son,” Schellnhuber says, pictured at the right with the boy, his wife and Britain’s Prince Charles on a visit to Potsdam in April. “I hope this all turns out to be wrong. I would be delighted if it turns out that we haven’t understood the system as well as we think we do, and that we might get a 20- to 30-year ‘breathing period’ when global warming slows or is even halted,” Schellnhuber said in an interview.

“I hope my son can live in a world where there won’t be massive conflicts because the sea level rises by a metre in his life time. I hope he’ll be able to have a happy life. But I’m growing increasingly worried.” 

I’ve had the chance to listen to Schellnhuber on several occasions in recent weeks and his infant son regularly comes up.

Catching rays + cutting emissions

The phrase “catching a few rays” might conjure up images of lying on a sunny beach.

But Germany’s Renewable Energy Act has given that phrase a whole new meaning. I’ve discovered that you can get paid for capturing the sun’s energy on your roof, converting it into CO2-free electricity with the help of special equipment, and feeding it into the grid — and watch the investment yield handsome long-term returns.

The German feed-in tariff system is as simple as it is successful – which is probably why Germany produces as much solar power as the rest of the world combined. German utilities are obliged under the Renewable Energy Act to pay above-market feed-in tariffs to producers of photovoltaic or wind energy for a period of 20 years. Germany will add up to 3 gigawatt of PV electricity this year. 

Here’s how the system works. 

German ships navigate Northeast Passage – but is it a good thing?

Two German ships have successfully navigated their way through the fabled Northeast Passage on the first commercial journey by a western shipping company on the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s Arctic-facing northern shore — a new cost-cutting passageway from Asia to Europe made possible by climate change.  

The MV “Beluga Fraternity” and the MV “Beluga Foresight” (pictured above) arrived safely at Novvy Port/Yamburg in Russia at the delta of the river Ob on Monday after a 17-day trip through the icy cold but briefly ice-free Arctic Ocean after departing from Vladivostok on Aug. 21. The ships had earlier picked up their cargo in Ulsan, South Korea and after delivering it in Novvy Port will steam on to the Netherlands to complete the Pacific-to-Atlantic journey that explorers and merchants have been dreaming about for centuries. 

Climate change opens Arctic’s Northeast passage

Two German ships set off on Friday on the first commercial journey from Asia to western Europe via the Arctic through the fabled Northeast Passage – a trip made possible by climate change. Niels Stolberg, president and CEO of Bremen-based Beluga Shipping, said the Northern Sea Route will cut thousands of nautical miles off the ships’ journey from South Korea to the Netherlands, reducing fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gas. I had the chance to ask Stolberg a few questions about the Arctic expedition:

Question: What’s the status of the voyage? Stolberg: MV “Beluga Fraternity” and the MV “Beluga Foresight” have just started to sail from Vladivostok (on Friday) with the destination Novyy Port at the river Ob.

Question: When did they leave Vladivostok and when will they arrive in Europe? Stolberg: They’ve just left Vladivostok. They are scheduled to arrive in Novyy Port around September 6th. After discharging, they will proceed via Murmansk to Rotterdam. Estimated time of arrival is still to be confirmed and up to further voyage development.

Question: How much time/fuel/money/CO2 will this northern route save? Stolberg: The amount of time, fuel, money or emission saved will be significant by transiting the Northeast Passage instead of sailing the traditional way through the Suez. From Ulsan via the Suez Canal to Rotterdam it would be a roughly 11,000 nautical mile journey whereas the short cut between Asia and Europe utilising the Northeast Passage is a 8,700 mile journey. The saved distance in detail always depends on the route, so the routes could be about 3,000 to 5,000 miles shorter. Savings of about three million euros by sending six vessels through the Northeast Passage per open time frame is realistic. Saving distance means saving bunker means saving money: That is the formula.