Last Sunday I had dinner with Christine Kamm, a member of the Bavarian Parliament from Augsburg who is the speaker on European issues for the Green Party State Parliament faction in the region Schwabia. She works on energy and transportation policy and you can tell in conversation she’s very anti-nuclear. She told me about the recent decision in Germany to shut down the last of their nuclear plants.
Germany itself is pretty anti-nuclear. To the already aware public Fukushima was the last straw. Even the conservative German Christian party realized it was unrealistic politically to continue a pro-nuclear stance because of the amount of votes that would be lost. Germany made a decision to stop with nuclear altogether-they’ve already shut down eight plants, and the rest will be shut off by 2022. It’s a very ambitious goal.
Germany does strongly support renewable power. There is a feed-in tariff (FIT) there which rewards homeowners and companies for becoming their own power makers in renewable energy-whether wind, water, solar, biomass, or biogas. Because it covers all renewables, the base load created comes from a variety of sources. Germany makes the incentive high enough to actually incentivize getting to the goals in renewable they want to achieve. The incentives provide a predictable stream of income to the project – this future income can be used to get investment money for the project-from banks, farmers, or whoever makes up the money and product source. The German Development Bank also offer low-interest loans. The larger the system you install with the feed-in-tariff the less you get from the government because you make it up in the size of your system.
To give some background, after WWII Germany rebuilt their industries and the utilities grew to be extremely centralized into the four major utilities that exist. The reason and goal for the FIT was to decentralize electricity production. All four of the big utility companies own some nuclear and other energy to sell, so mandating a closure on nuclear will not close any of the companies down.
Getting back to how Germany’s FIT works, the actual electric grids are owned by separate companies than the utilities. If a homeowner puts up PV (photovoltaic) on their roof or a company builds a wind farm, the grid operators are required to hook you to the grid.
Renewable energy also receives dispatch priority. Some people argue that in a FIT the little guy pays for inefficient plants because the cost to consumers goes up, but if the power source isn’t delivering what it is supposed to it’s not rewarded. The funds for the FIT payments are distributed among all electricity consumers. With a FIT you are getting money for every watt you produce-not just the excess so in a small system you’d use it for your home and you get money for that too. There are isolated FITS in America like in Gainsville, FL, as well as movements across the country to see if the idea can take hold here.
What are the goals Germany has set for renewables? There was a Renewable Energy Law passed in the EU which requires at least 20% of electric to come from renewable sources by 2020. Germany’s version is called the EEG, and its renewable electricity goal for 2020 is 35%. Germany already gets over 17% of its electricity from renewables; their 2050 goal is 80% renewables. Non-renewables will not be replaced by wind and solar alone-it wouldn’t be practical to think it would in Germany; biomass and biogas and geothermal need to be part of the mix to reach the targets.
The ambitious targets were set before Fukushima and Germany’s ending nuclear all together. So far they haven’t replaced the targets. Unless they are changed to lower numbers, replacing all the nuclear power quickly will be hard while still trying for the 35%/80% renewable goals. There are a lot of unknowns and a lot of moving parts. Is nuclear to be replaced by non-renewables?
To give you an idea of costs, in the EU solar per kw hour is the same price as wind off-shore-the biggest of the facilities-and some of these will definitely help replace nuclear. 8.5% electric power in Bavaria is biomass and 10% in Germany overall.
One thing is for sure, as I rode around Bavaria and saw rooftop solar on almost every other home-renewable energy is here to stay in Germany.
