This past September we stopped by the Folkecenter for Renewable Energy in a swing through Jutland. There we met with Preben Maegaard, longtime director of the Folkecenter and one of the pioneers of Danish wind power. . .
Solar Electricity Rebels (Stromrebellen)
Greg Pahl’s Power from the People is an inspirational guide to the burgeoning community power movement. His case studies of people who are making a difference is often a tale of endurance and survival, but also a powerful testament to the human spirit. . .
For the most part, Germany’s new energy producers are home owners, small and medium-sided businesses, and farmers, many of the latter who faced ruin only a decade ago. At the heart of Germany’s alternative energy bonanza is the country’s reputed Mittelstand: the nation’s well-situated, educated, conservative, entrepreneurial-minded middle class, which is the backbone of its economy. . .
The solar industry is booming. During the past decade PV shipments have grown by three orders of magnitude. In 2010 shipments were up over a hundred percent on 2009. How to account for this explosive growth? Though success has a thousand fathers, most analysts agree that the trigger was Germany’s solar feed-in tariff, first enacted in 2000 then turbocharged in 2004. Who deserves the credit for this extraordinarily effective policy mechanism? . .
In the early 1990s the city of Aachen (Aix-en-Chapelle) Germany set the world of solar energy on its ear. Until that time development of solar PV depended entirely on direct and substantial subsidies.
Alt captured that rebellious spirit in his inspiring tale of the small town of Schönau and how residents built a solar utility in the deep recesses of Germany’s Schwartzwald–the Black Forest of legend. The story has all the elements of its own legend in the making. Small town Davids against electric utility Goliaths. Simple townsfolk with a bright, you could say “sunny”, outlook on the future. And a decades-long struggle to bring their dream to reality. There’s a movie script waiting to be written, or at least a documentary
Pesch was named a strom (electricity) rebel by Elektritzitätswerke Schönau (EWS) in 2005 and that was a good reason for … Read more
