IN NO OTHER COUNTRY has the reactor disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in the wake of the tsunami led to such a radical change in policy as in Germany. As late as autumn 2010, Germany’s Federal Government had extended the service lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear power stations by an average of twelve years, committing itself to nuclear power as a bridge technology leading into the renewable energy age. After Fukushima this decision has not only been completely reversed, but less than four months after the serious nuclear accident in Japan, the German parliament has passed – by an overwhelming majority – legislation to permanently shut down eight reactors immediately and the remaining nine step-by-step by the end of 2022.
Many have speculated about what induced Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German government to make such a shift in energy policy. Perhaps Germany’s political leadership also recognized that an accelerated phasing-out of atomic energy holds considerable economic opportunities. In fact, the new German energy policy could become an export hit. Indeed it will have to, if it really wants to improve protection against the dangers of another major nuclear incident, the risks of proliferation and the problem of nuclear waste. After all, what use is it to shut down Germany’s 17 nuclear power stations when the country is surrounded by far more than 17 plants that are still operating?
The jury is still out on whether the energy revolution can really serve as a model for others. The only certainty is that the international community is watching with great interest whether – and how – Germany masters the challenge it has set itself. There is a lot of well-wishing interest in the project, at least among the populations of many countries. According to an international survey conducted by the Ipsos polling institute in April 2011, 62% of respondents said they rejected the use of nuclear power to generate energy. The majority is anti-nuclear almost everywhere: in Mexico and Turkey, South Korea and China, France and Russia.
The challenges that must be met, however, involve far more than a determination to make do without nuclear power within a decade. Turning off the reactors is actually the easy part of the energy-revolution project. For it is said that the lights won’t go out even without the reactors, which supplied about one quarter of Germany’s power in 2010. Electricity bills should remain affordable for citizens and businesses even without cheap nuclear power. And Germany should be able to meet its climateprotection target of 40% lower greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 (compared to 1990) even without low-emission nuclear energy. Can this vision come true? It can, as has meanwhile been demonstrated in many expert reports, but only if at least two conditions are met: energy must be used much more efficiently in the future than it has been up to now, and it must increasingly come from renewable sources, in fact completely within a few decades.
Germany has an “infinite amount of energy”. This is a popular motto for advertising renewable energy sources. And it’s true. Another is that the sun “doesn’t send us a bill”. That’s true too. But it’s also true that the diverse forms of solar energy – radiation, wind, water and biomass – come to us in a very diluted state of aggregation. Renewable energies therefore first have to be laboriously collected and pooled before they can be usefully employed. By comparison, the energy in coal or nuclear fuel rods is highly concentrated. Furthermore, the sun does not really deliver power to our doors for free. Rather, a lot of technology, capital and material is required to trap solar energy and make it available at the right time and in the right place: in other words, where it is needed at a certain moment, for example where someone is just about to switch on a light.
This also distinguishes the new energy from the old. It is not available round the clock and everywhere – at least not when we are talking about power from wind or sunlight. Under German conditions, solar cells reach their peak output for less than 1,000 hours a year (out of the nearly 9,000 hours that are available in a year); onshore wind turbines manage about 2,000 full-load hours. Power for the remaining time must be generated either elsewhere or by some other means, or else retrieved from stores previously topped up with renewable power. Such “batteries” include, for example, pumped storage plants – which, like wind turbines and high-voltage power lines, are aesthetically controversial. The progress made towards the energy revolution is therefore already being met by reservations on the part of people who would justifiably call themselves green-minded.
The journey to the new world of energy won’t be an easy one. It will consist of a mix of energy sources that are controllable and fluctuating, centralized and decentralized, domestic and imported. The journey will be supported by stores and by consumers who in future will also have to do their bit to make the transformation of the energy system possible, according to a book that was recently published (in German) on the “Road to 100% Renewable Energy”. In view of such complexity, conflicting aims and problems of acceptance, it would be surprising if there were no side effects accompanying the energy revolution for the time being. However, they should prove to be all the more manageable, the more efficient the world of new energies becomes. One issue is cost-effectiveness – in other words, generating the required “green” electricity with as little input as possible, storing it and transporting it to every single socket round the clock. Cross-border cooperation makes this easier. Another issue, however, is energy efficiency – in other words, reducing energy consumption per euro of GDP. This cuts costs, reduces the pressure on the environment and gives us more time to revamp the energy system – time that is needed to build infrastructure, develop technologies and win acceptance. Efficiency is the key that will decide on the success of transformation – in Germany and elsewhere. Germany has already become more energy-efficient. While the economy has been growing, total energy consumption has fallen since 1990, at least a little. Only electricity consumption has continued to rise over the last two decades – by about 10%. Now the aim is to reduce it by 10% by 2020. Reducing power consumption by that amount would mean that more than two fifths of the power previously generated by nuclear plants would simply no longer be needed; the proportion of green electricity would rise from 17% (2010) to nearly 20% – without building a single additional wind turbine.
In mid-July 2011 the Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan declared: “We must develop a society that can manage without nuclear power.” These words are reminiscent of those spoken by Germany’s former Environment Minister Klaus Töpfer after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. At the time, Töpfer, who later became Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), wanted to “invent” a future without nuclear energy. In the meantime, a quarter of a century later, Germany has started out on this road. It’s an experiment. An experiment with a prospect of added value, not only for Germany.///
