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.
Renn is part of a revolution in renewable energy that is sweeping across Germany and bringing citizens of every kind into the fight against global warming.
While a new report from the Centre for Alternative Energy 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 Worner, 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. Worner 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 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% to 9%. The cost is spread by generating companies among all users and has added about one cent/kilowatt hour to the average bill or an extra £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 European Union 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 eastern Germany in 2000 with 19 staff. It now has 1 200 and expects by 2010 to have 5 000 staff. 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 more than half its product.
“The feed-in tariff changed everything — it is that simple,” says Stefan Dietrich, Q-Cells spokesperson. Demand is such that Bavarian farmers, with large barn roofs and fields, are the biggest customer group for PV in the world, he adds. Jurgen 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.”
Kurt Krannich, head of Krannich Solar, one of Germany’s biggest solar energy distributors, says, though, that the future could be bright for Britain if only the country introduces a FIT and lets the Germans supply Britain’s solar energy.
“Then I think Britain could catch Germany up in just three years,” he says. — Â