The Environment in Germany – Panorama

There is no alternative to a politics of sustainability. German municipalities are vying for the status of a model ecological community.

The Saxon town of Ostritz led the way. The country town of 3,000 inhabitants is situated in what during the GDR was called the “Black Triangle” at the border to Poland and Czechoslovakia, where the townspeople were subjected for decades to the side-effects of the socialist industrial revolution and brown coal combustion. But after the “Wende” following German reunification, Ostritz accomplished an unprecedented turn in energy policy.

Twenty years ago, in view of rising unemployment and emigration, the town fathers of the parish in the district of Löbau-Zittau, not far from Dresden, committed themselves to a re-regionalisation of economic cycles, part of which was the idea of energy self-sufficiency. What set the ball rolling was restarting the disused hydroelectric facility of the Cistercian abbey St. Marienthal on the river Neiße. In the meantime, the town has succeeded in supplying more than one hundred per cent of its needs with hydropower, biomass, solar and wind energy. This has rightly given Ostritz the reputation of being Germany’s model town for ecological energy.

Parishes determine energy policy

It is a title to which a hundred other regional bodies now also lay claim. They have all made it their goal to organise their energy supply more efficiently and to shift it in the medium term completely to renewable sources. “One hundred per cent parishes are no longer such rare birds”, says Jörg Mayer, Managing Director of the Agency for Renewable Energy. “With the knowledge available today and the equally favourable geographical and political conditions, renewable energies offer all German parishes and regions a high-yield business model that no intelligent town councilman can any longer ignore”.

German Minister for the Environment Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) lauds the on-the-spot spirit and drive, not only with a view to coping with the global challenges that arise from scarcity of resources and climate change: “These initiatives have in common the motive of bringing together positive economic, ecological and social effects for the good of people”.

Behind the “green wave” at the parish level is the circumstance that in many places in the next few years concession contracts with supra-regional energy providers will be expiring. From increased self-commitment, the towns and communities expect not only a more sustainable supply of energy from regional and renewable sources, but also the strengthening of local value creation. For example, Northern Hesse, which is in fact the home of an extraordinary concentration of energy-related institutions, associations and businesses, sees itself as a “model region” in the research and development, production and application of decentralised energy technologies. “We want the energy branch to become the economic motor of the region and to assume the role in Northern Hesse that is today occupied by the automobile industry”, declares the web site Kompetenznetzwerks Dezentrale Energietechnologien(deENet / i.e., Competence Network for Decentralised Energy Technologies), whose other participants include the Institute for Solar Energy , the Centre for Sustainable Building and the Society for the Rational Use of Energy.

“Model ecological town” Kassel

“Climate Neutral Parish” is the name of one of many projects of the Enet. Supported by funds from the Hessian environment budget, it is intended to develop a simultaneously scientifically sound and practical energy concept using the examples of three “model parishes”: Eschwege, Lichtenfels and Wolfhagen.

Bertram Hilgen (SPD), Mayor of Kassel, is a member of the advisory board of the Competence Network. The city of approximately 200,000 inhabitants has also primped itself with the title of a “model ecological city” since the municipal electric company changed its power supplier at the end of 2007 and now, instead of using electricity generated by fossil fuel and nuclear power from E.ON, takes renewable electricity from Vattenfall. A title to which it is not due, say critics. Apart from the fact that the city’s new partner is anything but an ecological paragon – with its use of brown coal conversion, the Swedish energy multi operates some of the biggest carbon dioxide emitters in Europe – commentators have criticised Kassel’s lack of a notably active contribution to climate protection.

Many look upon Kassel’s switch to Scandinavian electricity generated by hydropower, which has enjoyed high visibility thanks to a check conducted by the Freiburg Eco Institute, as merely an act of symbolic politics. Some have spoken even of fraudulent labelling, for the hundred per cent supplying of Kassel households with electricity generated by hydropower merely redistributes the existing energy mix in the European nets without thereby generating a single additional kilowatt of clean power. “What good is it”, ask critics, “that clean power from Sweden flows into Kassel if in return superfluous electricity generated by nuclear power in Germany is piped into Scandinavia?”

Gradually expanding indigenous production

In the newspaper taz, Hermann Scheer summed up Mayor Hiligen’s energy policy as “a fundamental commitment to renewable energy and an important first step”. The second step that the SPD energy expert would like to see taken is that parishes “become either self-producers of renewable energy or work together with a green electricity provider that really increases the total amount of renewable energy in Germany”.

Meanwhile, Andreas Helbig, Chairman of the Municipal Electric Works PLC, has announced the intention to expand gradually indigenous production into 2020. “For citizens who would already like to use renewable electricity generated here in Kassel, we have our ‘local electricity’, which is produced at the river power plant Neue Mühle and at various photovoltaic plants in the city. The additional revenues are invested in the expansion of our generative capacities.”