IEEE Spectrum July, 2009 - 34

at least, before big offshore wind farms are feeding the German
grid. "Germany lost a lot of momentum," says Eduard Sala de
Vedruna, a senior analyst tracking wind energy for the consul‑
tancy Emerging Energy Research, of Cambridge, Mass., and
Barcelona. "The offshore projects are at a quite immature stage."
The idea that Germany is playing catch‑up with Europe's
most promising strategy for renewable energy is jarring. This
is Germany, after all, the country that 11 years ago put the Green
Party in government, decided to phase out nuclear power, and
pushed wind energy and photovoltaics to grid scale. Today
Germany's installed wind‑turbine capacity of 24 gigawatts
ranks second only to that of the United States (which has
25 GW). But despite the promises, greenhouse‑gas emissions
there haven't plummeted. Rather, they have gone down only
slightly since 2000. Germany, it seems, has lost its groove.
The result is a turnabout that would have seemed prepos‑
terous even six months ago: "Everyone in the environmen‑
tal community is looking to the U.S. now," says Elias Perabo,
who codirects a campaign against the use of coal for Germany's
Berlin‑based Climate Alliance.
The dearth of offshore wind turbines is just one of several
signs of a slowdown in the country's two‑decade‑old transi‑
tion to renewable energy. Germany's balkanized power grid,
split between east and west when the country was divided and
not yet fully knit back together, remains ill adapted to the vari‑
able flows from renewable energy. And Germany is readying
a new generation of coal‑fired power plants-including three
proposed for Brunsbüttel.
The story of how Germany lost the lead in the transition to
greener sources of energy contains a complex blend of backlash,
environmental conflict, and competing commercial interests.
It is a cautionary tale, showing in particular that public con‑
sensus about the urgency of combating climate change is just a
first step in delivering a renewable‑energy system.

No couNtry has Pushed renewable energy

harder than Germany has. And much of that impetus came from
one development: disenchantment with nuclear energy, which
supplies about a quarter of the country's electrical needs.
Public opinion turned abruptly against nuclear power in
1986, after the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine sent radioactive
fallout over northern Europe and made West Germans uneasy
about their own reactors. Popular concern after Chernobyl
froze construction of additional reactors and fueled calls from
the political left to scrap the nation's existing nuclear plants.
The chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, refused to abandon
this source of carbon‑free electricity, declaring climate change
to be Germany's top environmental challenge.
In this way, Kohl forged a political consensus for reducing
greenhouse‑gas emissions. But so far it is renewable energy,
not nuclear, that has reaped the benefits. In 1990, the German
government passed its path‑breaking Electricity Feed‑in Law,
compelling utilities to buy all the power that renewable sources
on their grid could generate-and at premium prices. The
Feed‑in Law thus set off a wind‑power boom.
In 2001 that boom boomeranged on nuclear energy under
Kohl's successor, Gerhard Schröder. His Green Party-Social
Democrat coalition cited wind energy as proof that Germany
had an alternative to dirty coal and Russian natural gas in
replacing nuclear power. Schröder's government passed leg‑
islation to shut down all of the country's reactors by 2022.
For that to happen, though, offshore wind power would be
42

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key. Germans, like most people, love the idea of wind power,
but not all of them like the idea of having their landscapes
marred by 130‑meter‑tall wind turbines. What is more, thanks
largely to the 1990 law, most of the sites on land best suited
to wind generation were already occupied. So installing tur‑
bines in their offshore territorial waters seemed like the best
way around these obstacles. And because winds are in general
stronger offshore than onshore, planting turbines far out in the
sea promised twice as many hours of peak generation for each
megawatt of installed capacity (assuming that offshore equip‑
ment functions reliably over time).
With these virtues in mind, the government passed its
Renewable Energy Act in 2000, extending the favorable tariffs
to wind farms in Germany's North Sea and Baltic waters. By
2002-the year in which annual installations on land peaked
at 3240 MW-developers had filed 29 proposals for offshore
farms that together would have had a generating capacity of
63 GW, which was equal to half of Germany's entire installed
capacity at the time. Germany's ministry for the environ‑
ment (its Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz und
Reaktorsicherheit, or BMU) forecast that 500 MW of offshore
wind would be operating by 2006 and that an additional
2500 MW would come on line by 2010.
Then the plans crashed headlong into political reality.
Almost immediately, conservationists and marine ecologists
questioned proposed incursions into near‑shore areas where
millions of migratory birds breed and feed. The BMU handled
that challenge by studying it carefully and then, in 2005, des‑
ignating permissible zones for wind development that were far
from shore and in deep water.
As the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden
pressed forward with pioneering wind farms installed in
water less than 20 meters deep and within 15 kilometers of
the shore, Germany's maritime authority offered developers
20‑ to 40‑meter waters, located for the most part 40 km or
more from the coast. That raised the cost and technical risk of
German projects. Earlier, the German government had man‑
dated a tariff of at most 9.1 euro cents (13 U.S. cents) per kilowatt‑
hour for offshore wind‑generated electricity, no more than its
neighbors were offering, despite the higher costs and risks.
Boosting the tariff to match the challenge faced opposition
from the Big Four utilities that dominate Germany's power
sector: E.ON, RWE (formerly called Rheinisch‑Westfälisches
Elektrizitätswerk), Swedish power giant Vattenfall, and
Électricité de France-owned EnBW (Energ ie Baden‑
Württemberg). Saddled with purchasing rising levels of wind
power at top rates, these companies were pressing Berlin to
scrap the special tariffs being offered.

it was the revival of Kohl's center‑right Christian

Democratic Union party under Chancellor Angela Merkel that
delivered the concessions needed to kick‑start the offshore‑wind
industry. In 2006 Merkel's government-a coalition that also
included the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Union-
made power‑grid operators responsible for running cables to off‑
shore farms. That shaved about one‑fifth off the average cost of a
project. And last year Merkel improved the revenue side of the led‑
ger, boosting the offshore tariff to €0.15/kWh (US $0.21/kWh).
Slow but sure change is, well, in the wind. In a world that's
putting a price on carbon, Germany's Big Four power giants
are warming to the commercial potential of renewable energy.
Over the past few years they have bought into offshore wind by
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2009
