Germany sets
shining example in providing a harvest for the world Ashley Seager:The Guardian, Monday 23 July 2007 09.10 BST
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Hanno Renn, a Freiburg taxi driver, invested in a communal
solar electricity system on a building in the German town in 1993.
"Everyone laughed and said I was wasting my money," he says.
But now he has paid off his investment and earns a regular income
from the electrical company for the power he generates. "I have
had the last laugh," he grins.
Mr Renn is part of a revolution in renewable energy that is
sweeping Germany and bringing citizens of every kind into the
fight against global warming. While a new report from the Centre
for Alternative Technology says Britain could, with sufficient
will and effort, go zero carbon in only 20 years, Germany's
figures put the British government's claims to be leading the
world on climate change into perspective. Germany has 200 times as
much solar energy as Britain. It generates 12% of its electricity
from various renewables, compared with 4.6% in Britain. It has
created a quarter of a million jobs in renewables - a number that
is growing fast. Britain has only 25,000, a number that represents
the amount of jobs created in the industry in Germany in the past
year alone.
Freiburg, a town of 200,000 people in the Black Forest, has
almost as much solar photovoltaic (PV) power as the whole of
Britain. Dr Dieter Wörner, director of Freiburg's environmental
protection agency, admits that such is the competition among
German towns that Ulm has just overtaken Freiburg as solar capital
of the world.
"But we are still expanding rapidly. It's a sporting contest," he
says. Indeed, by the time Britain starts its first eco-town in
2016, Germany will have 50 or 60 eco-cities. Small wonder that the
Labour government has quietly dropped the pledge it made six years
ago to catch up with Germany by 2010. In Germany, too, the higher
production has pushed prices down sharply.
A typical 3kw PV system costs about £17,000 in Britain but
less than £10,000 in Germany. Dr Wörner says prices have halved in
the past seven years and will do so again in the next seven.
The secret of German success is the "feed-in tariff" (FIT). Anyone
generating electricity from solar PV, wind or hydro gets a
guaranteed payment of four times the market rate - currently about
35p pence a unit - for 20 years.
This reduces the payback time on such technologies to less than 10
years and offers a return on investment of 8-9%. The cost is
spread by generating companies among all users and has added about
one cent/kwh to the average bill, or an extra €1.50 (£1) a month.
The Germans introduced the FIT in 1999 and tweaked it in
2004, since which time things have gone mad. FITs have now been
adopted in 19 EU countries, and 47 worldwide, but not in Britain.
German renewables firms are now world beaters and the German
economy has been strengthened, not weakened, by a rush into
renewables.
Britain, by contrast, has a few installation companies mainly
importing German equipment. At the recent Intersolar trade fair in
Freiburg, the air was heady with talk of expansion, cutting-edge
technologies and intense competition. And everyone says the reason
is the FIT.
Take Q-Cells. The company started making silicon PV cells
in east Germany in 2000 with 19 staff. It now has 1,200 and
expects by 2010 to have 5,000. It is one of the fastest-growing
companies on the planet and is the world's second-largest maker of
PV cells, after Sharp of Japan. It exports over half its product.
"The feed-in tariff changed everything - it is that
simple," says Stefan Dietrich, Q-Cells spokesman. Demand is such
that Bavarian farmers, with large barn roofs and fields, are the
biggest customer group for PV in the world, he adds. Jürgen
Kaiser-Gerwens, finance director at Schott AG, a maker of PV cells
and of "concentrated solar power" - solar collectors that
concentrate the sun's rays to heat a fluid and drive turbines -
agrees. "The FIT gives companies a good basis for planning but
also makes them become more efficient and competitive. It is a
win-win-win - for the industry, the government and individuals."
