From a country that counts less than a third of its daylight hours as sunny, to be the world leader in solar installation wasn’t an easy game. Germany is neither ranked among the warmest countries of the world nor does it talk big about sunny spots spread around its territory. It was the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) which did the magic. German citizens have been scaling onto their roofs to install solar panels ever since the introduction of this act. This has led to a major surge in solar energy as the demand for solar panels rose by about 50 per cent, giving the solar companies total revenue of USD435 million in a single year.
With the Zero Emissions Hotel Victoria, Germany now boasts the first European hotel to run solely on alternative energy. It is today the third largest producer of solar cells after China and Japan and has the leading market for photovoltaic systems. It also has to its credit half of the world’s total solar installations.
Tracking into Germany’s sustainable energy escalation, one finds an atypical episode. The German people decided to skip the long drawn out process of waiting for the costs of new technology to fall and instead went straight to turning solar energy into an industry proper. The secret of German success is the "feed-in tariff". Anyone generating electricity from solar, wind or hydro gets a guaranteed payment of four times the market rate. The Renewable Energy Act states that power companies must purchase the alternative energy produced by citizens at a cost fixed above-market rate for 20 years. This instigated a solar “gold rush” by private citizens and corporations.
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.
Germany has about 200 times more solar energy than Britain. It generates 12 per cent of its electricity from various renewables, compared with the 4.6 per cent in Britain and has created a quarter of a million jobs in renewables. Freiburg, a town of 200,000 people, has almost as much solar power as the whole of Britain. By the time Britain starts its first eco-town in 2016, Germany will have 50 or 60 eco-cities.
Rather than instilling fear and worry in the hearts of its citizens by spiking utility bills and gas prices, alternative energy should be embraced as an economic necessity and something that every citizen can take part in. With Feed-in Tariffs now being adopted in 19 EU countries, and about 47 countries worldwide, renewable energy is all set for a new dawn.
