German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks during debates at the Bundestag over the 2013 federal budget on November 21, 2012 in Berlin, Germany.
As the temperatures begin to dip below freezing in Europe, an unsightly conflict is heating up between clean-energy champion Germany and its pro-nuclear neighbors in Poland and the Czech Republic. Keep reading →
It might at first glance look like a good omen that the EU has shown up at the current United Nations climate change conference in Doha, Qatar, with its carbon emission reduction goals for 2020 already met.
Eight years ahead of time, Europe’s emissions are below its longstanding goal of a 20% reduction by 2020 compared to a 1990 baseline. In theory, Europe is a clean energy model for other countries striving to achieve the Kyoto-set targets and begin to reign in global warming. Keep reading →
The Berlin-based Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank close to Germany’s Greens, argues that Germany could – with the right policies – go 100% renewable by 2050, even as it phases out nuclear power and sticks to EU carbon emission limits.
Germany’s current target, embraced by the Merkel administration, is 80% clean energy by mid-century. Keep reading →
While Germany’s once soaring photovoltaic sector is going through very hard times – a consequence primarily of cheap Chinese imports – the country’s wind energy sector, also a market leader, has so far managed to stay on its feet. But the industry is not booming like it did just a few years ago and is scaling back its expectations for 2012. Experts in Germany say that the German wind industry should expect even tougher competition coming its way soon, possibly from China.
In Germany one of the country’s solar panel manufacturers after another closed their doors over the past year and a half: Battling with China and other new competitors the world-wide industry created a glut and prices went tumbling down in 2009 and 2010. With them went under what had been several of the choicest success stories of Germany’s post-unification economy, many of them in the former eastern Germany which had benefited immensely from the upstart renewables industry. Keep reading →
In 1996, when the German Wind Energy Association (GWEA) came to life, the full force of Germany’s onshore wind power amounted to a handful of entrepreneurs experimenting with a budding but imperfect technology.
Today, only 16 years later, onshore wind power constitutes 8 percent of Germany’s energy supply, generating nearly half of the nation’s renewable electricity. More than 24,000 wind turbines dot the German landscape with a capacity of more than 32,000 megawatts. Keep reading →
The European Union (EU) has the reputation of a bureaucracy awash in red tape. Yet when it comes to wind power, and above all onshore wind, its policies over the last decade have proven enormously effective getting this precocious branch of business in Europe on its feet – and even booming.
Despite an ongoing economic crisis, Europe’s wind power industry has flourished as few others, not least as a consequence of the EU targets, national action plans, and other framework regulation including carbon pricing. Keep reading →
