Legal Shake-Up Threatens Germany’s Energy ‘Revolution’

In Germany, people’s power has wrought a revolution.

All over the country, citizens have formed co-operatives to build wind farms and solar arrays, in a grassroots push that has helped to make Germany a world leader in renewables.

The change is most striking in places like Saerbeck, a village of 7,200 people in the north-west that is a pioneer in collectively-owned carbon-free power. Thanks to a €75m investment in a wind-and-solar park, it is well on the way to becoming entirely self-sufficient in energy.

German Consul General Boasts of His Nation's Renewable Energy Policy

The Germans call their nation's energy policy Energiewende. But the literal translation of the word — energy transition — belies the green revolution behind those few syllables.

For Germany, the word is synonymous with a gradual, but nonetheless radical, shift away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy. Germany is today one of the world's leading producers of green energy, with 27 percent of its power needs generated by solar, wind and hydroelectric power, among other sources.

On some sunny days, half of Germany's energy demands are met by solar power, something critics of U.S. energy policy say remains a vain hope in the states.

American and German Approaches to Energy-Climate Policy

Germany’s energy transition, or Energiewende, offers lessons for the United States, just not the ones typically cited on this side of the Atlantic. The challenges and concerns that have arisen in Germany should not be taken as indicators that the Energiewende is failed policy, or more specifically, to dismiss the importance of renewable energy.

Germany Clears Changes to Green Energy Law

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed yesterday to revamp Germany’s green energy laws to curb the high cost of power in Europe’s biggest economy and head off the threat of a political backlash.

The changes unveiled by Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel came after Brussels agreed to slow the pace of phasing out government backing for alternative energy, as a result paving the way for Merkel to press on with her ambitious energy plan — the so-called Energiewende.

Fracking Is Not a Good Alternative to Germany’s Renewable Energy Policy

Over the past few months, oil and gas expert Daniel Yergin has become a critic of the Energiewende, Germany's clean energy policy, due to its its impact on energy prices for industry.

"There has been a kind of waking up to the fact that the premises of the Energiewende, however well-intentioned they are, no longer hold because the world is changed," wrote Yergin in a recent New York Times article.