British environmentalists love Germany’s energy policies

British environmentalists love Germany’s energy policies. Mistake!

Even though Britain lies outside the Euro, and its memories of the Second World War have faded, Britain still wonders about Germany. We envy your Mittelstand, respect your cars, and, though we are proud of our own carmakers, realise that they are all foreign-owned, and that it is BMW which manufactures the Mini. As the 100th anniversary of the First World War draws near, a few intransigent British historians insist that, instead of bemoaning the slaughter, the outcome should be acknowledged as a victory. Yet there is one issue around which right-on British opinion, at least, is unambiguously full of admiration: Germany’s ‘energy transformation’.

British environmentalists of every type insist that Germany’s exit from nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster of March 2011 has turned out well. By the end of 2011 a threatened rise in energy imports proved to be just a fall in exports, from 70 to 7TWh. Energy consumption was down by 5.3 per cent, energy efficiency rose, energy prices fell, and emissions fell by two per cent. ‘Germany’, a top Green correspondent for the Guardian proclaimed in May 2012, ‘had been planning its nuclear exit since 2002’, and was ‘now showing it can be done without hitches’.

A year later, the Guardian was still raving about German energy policy. It conceded that there are ‘question marks’ over the transport and storage of wind energy, and that a surcharge on renewable energy has made an average family’s energy bills rise by 47 per cent in just two years, giving Germany the second highest energy bills in Europe. Yet the Guardian quotes Wuppertal Institute vice president Professor Dr Manfred Fischedick enthusiastically: those bills could fall if consumers start looking at their use of energy, ‘because many people are not really aware of that’. Bills can fall if Germans are taught ‘appropriate and smart behaviour’, and if ‘new forms of incentive systems, such as ecological taxes’, are ‘discussed’.

Now even us insular Brits know there have been big anti-nuclear campaigns in the past 30-40 years in Germany. We know about the rise and continuing presence of the Greens there. Clearly, too, Germany has not been immune to recession since 2008. Yet, after all this, Fukushima, and Germany’s subsequent energy transformation… are Germans really unaware of their energy consumption?

They must really be stupid!

Such mass German ignorance can only astound. For the trump card of Britain’s Green energy Germanophiles is Germany’s ‘prosumer’ model – that state of grace in which consumers of energy also produce it. More than 65 per cent of Germany’s colossal renewables capacity, which stands at 23 per cent of national electricity output, may be ‘community-owned’ by individuals or farmers. Surely these upright burgers, at least, must track their energy? And if, through trendy ‘crowdfunding’, Germans really have raised €63bn in less than a decade to finance renewable energy, as Greenpeace claims, how can so many not know about their energy habits?

Going off-grid as personal liberation

In fact the term ‘prosumer’ was invented back in 1980 by the American Stalinist-turned-futurologist Alvin Toffler. Recently it has had a revival, as the American petit-bourgeois vision of a 3D printer in every home has grown in popularity. In energy, however, the idea of renewables as freedom, in the sense of freedom from centralised and ‘politically inaccessible’ electrical transmission grids run or used by private utilities, or of freedom from the possibility of those grids being sabotaged by malcontents, has in fact appealed to commentators since 1976 (1). And today, British environmentalists not only love this kind of liberation, but specifically hail Germany’s supposed achievement of it. In an otherwise fairy balanced article about German solar power, author and campaigner Nick Rosen’s website Off-Grid  – subtitle: ‘Free yourself’ – refers to ‘the political structure, with powerful local government’ in Germany, and continues:

‘… energy prices continue to sink [sic], and solar installation continues to grow. By decentralising power generation, the renewables boom could do to the power industry what the internet did to the media: put power in the hands of the little guy. As soon as the sun comes out, that is.’

That the word ‘power’ here doesn’t just mean electrical power, but also political power, is indicated by the familiar reference to the internet democratising media.

Does, however, localised or even household-based renewable energy really connote freedom, any more than does the ability to self-publish through, say, Twitter, or the ability slowly to 3D-print a plastics Gartenzwerg?

To its credit, Off-Grid registers the intermittent character of solar and wind power, and goes on to note that

‘until researchers can find a way to store energy at a large scale, coal and nuclear plants – which can’t simply be switched on and off at will – must be kept running to guarantee a steady stream of electricity when the sun isn’t shining’.

So off-grid electricity depends on conventional fossil-fuel plants, nuclear reactors, centralised electricity grids. Indeed given how energy works in a globalised world economy these days, off-grid power – even in a Germany of Länder – will depend not just on a national but also on an international division of labour. Yet suppose that, despite the crisis in energy innovation in the West today, large-scale storage of solar and wind power becomes possible. Wouldn’t each German householder then have reached genuine self-sufficiency, and freedom with it?

Perhaps. The Guardian enthuses that, just east of Berlin, the 128 inhabitants of a hamlet named Feldheim, ‘set amid rippling rye fields and foxy-barked [sic] forests’, now ‘get all their power by tapping into some of the 43 turbines dotting the fields around, some solar panels and a plant that turns farmyard manure into gas-powered electricity’. But wait. Each of these wind turbines is 85 metres high. We hear nothing about the cost, engineering and safety regimes that surround such structures. As with wind, we hear nothing about regimes around solar and manure, and nothing, too, about what all three technologies imply in terms of upgrading Germany’s existing grid. There is silence about the regimes that will surround local storage (more distant storage would mean electricity transmission losses, which environmentalists don’t like). And cleaning, maintenance, repair, disposal and replacement of turbines, pillars, panels and manure-composting machines – who is going to do all this work?

This is not being ‘free’. Either Feldheimers practice energy skills themselves; or qualified energy engineers from outside Feldheim do that work. Either way, though especially in the Do-It-Yourself case, local and green energy supply will – as ever – be labour-intensive. So it turns out that the freedom hypothesised by fans of off-grid renewables comes at a certain price.

Now, given how much Brits harp on about it, any internationalist wouldn’t much want to stress here Germany’s brief, notorious and tragic 20th century conflation of work with freedom. Yet illusions about work amounting to freedom still deserve to be crushed. Indeed, illusions about off-grid living deserve to be crushed in Britain, not just in Germany.

The real relevance of energy to liberation

Sadly, in Britain it is left to climate sceptics, as well as the more official kind of Green publishing, to stress or to hint at, respectively, the economic dangers of Germany’s energy transformation. I won’t rehearse the details now: German readers will know more about current and future capacity trends, energy shortages and energy price rises, energy subsidies, and shale gas. In energy innovation, though, the table below, based on data collected by the International Energy Agency, is worth noting:

German budgets for energy research, design and development (RD&D), selected items, 1980-2012, in constant 2012 Euros, million (2)

	1980	1990	2000	2009	2012
Nuclear	1078	337	164	219	220
Fossil Fuels	249	93	10	33	32.5
Renewable	111.5	104	82	187	240
Energy efficiency	81	18	10	104	137
‘Other power & storage technologies’	69	9	24	19	46
Electricity transmission & distribution	1.7	1.8	2.3	0.25	8.6
Total	1590	563	292	562	684

The following trends emerge from this table:

1) Overall, German R&D in key energy technologies, in constant Euros, is today significantly below half of what it was in 1980

2) In Germany, a rise R&D in renewable energy and energy efficiency – chiefly in home insulation – has failed to compensate for big declines in R&D around fossil fuels and nuclear energy. That is a measure of the ‘success’ that Greenish politics and state regulation have had

3) More than a third of R&D in green energy technologies relates to energy efficiency, not energy supply

4) Like that in fossil fuels, German R&D in transmission and storage technologies, which would assist the use of wind power, is virtually non-existent.

On top of these broadly economic trends there are more sociological trends that are interesting. There are

5) The health and safety scares – some of them no doubt well-founded – that, ironically, surround German renewables

6) The behavioural economics that now go with the idea of ‘educating’ Germans into cutting energy use.

When, however, we add up all these developments, both economic and sociological, a clearer picture of the relevance of energy to liberation in Germany becomes clear.

The hoary old Marxist proposition is that, without forward advance in the productive forces (energy included), poverty – or at least finding one’s energy bills excessive – will remain endemic, in Germany as elsewhere. Given Britain’s favourable if faintly nervous perceptions of German wealth, perhaps that proposition no longer applies: maybe the German masses, including its ethnic minorities, have made a permanent exit from the ranks of the world’s poor.

Myself, I rather doubt that.

To avoid ostalgie, however, let’s go beyond that Marxist proposition, and say the following.

Ever since the formation, in 1883, of what was to become AEG, and ever since the Silesian Marxist hunchback, dwarf and energy technology genius Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923) (3), Germany has been a historic leader in energy innovation. Yet by 2000, Germany spent less than a third of a billion Euros on energy R&D. It is not now in the mood to make energy innovations – and it is lackadaisical even in renewables R&D. The mood is rather to fear all kinds of energy and energy innovation, especially the nuclear kind, but also fossil fuel and even renewable energy; to stress energy efficiency, not energy supply, storage, or energy grids; not to bother with energy exports, and to stress instead ‘growing and funding your own’ renewable energy, no matter how inefficiently.

So Germany’s energy transformation amounts to what Brits call ‘battening down the hatches’ in a storm. It is an attempt at autarchy, not liberation.

Still, Germany’s commitment to renewable energy, even if at what appear to be largely static levels of technology, is great. Perhaps there has even emerged, if not a class of renewable energy producers, then certainly plenty of households ready to spend hours and hours performing energy tasks – and if not, ready to pay a new group of energy serfs to perform such tasks instead. No doubt many of these households may also be broadly hostile to economic growth, to energy innovation and to alleged energy ‘blackmail’ from Russia, the Middle East and other foreign lands. Many may also fear for Germany’s ‘climate security’, a kind of apprehension which Germany helped pioneer back in 2007 (4).

To British eyes, and no doubt to many German ones too, all this looks rather disturbing.

Of course, Germany may manage never to see its homes, workplaces and public spaces go dark, or its transport interrupted. Yet the way things are going, that will be possible not through investment and thoroughgoing innovation in every energy technology, but only through the mass adoption of an inward-looking, individualistic, obsessive and exhausting regime of renewable energy supply and universal energy conservation. Workers of Germany uniting with foreign workers to lose their chains? It is more like German villagers engaging in financially questionable cooperatives and politically questionable parochialism, so as to chain themselves to energy matters.

Real liberation, among other things, will mean most Germans, most of the time, not having to bother to think or do much about energy. It will mean energy supply, storage and transmission being so advanced, it becomes ‘part of the furniture’. Here energy would recede from and disappear from the cognitive landscape. The more thoughtful, open-minded and magnanimous Germans are about energy supply, the more thoughtless they can be about energy use.

At the moment Germans are not embarked on such a course. They will not, to paraphrase Marx, ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening [and] criticise after dinner’ (5). Instead, what appeals to many Germans, it seems, is to engage in energy harvesting, energy saving and energy worrying – morning, noon and night.

Germans need liberation from energy. Instead, they look like they are headed toward being the slaves of energy.

British environmental opinion would like to follow Germany along this path. What a mistake!

References

(1) James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky, Energise! A future for energy innovation, Beautiful Books, 2009, pp361-5, 405-6

(2) International Energy Agency, Detailed Country RD&D Budgets, Germany, Energy Technology RD&D 2013 Edition, IEA Data Services, Paris, 2013. Access Data Services on http://www.iea.org/statistics/onlinedataservice/. The approach in this table and to the issues in this section follows that in James Woudhuysen, ‘Innovation in energy: expressions of a crisis, and some ways forward’, Energy & Environment, Vol 23, Nos 6 & 7, 2012.

(3) In 1900 Steinmetz was the brilliant chief consulting engineer at General Electric, US. In an epoch-making move, he proposed to GE  that it establish an electrochemical research lab near to but ‘entirely separate from’ its factory at Schenectady, NY. The main mission of the lab was to see off Westinghouse. Its subsidiary mission, however, was to perform pure science – and, in the process, attract top-class scientists. This pure science role for a corporate lab was a world first: see George Wise, Willis R Whitney, General Electric, and the origins of US industrial research, Columbia University Press, 1985. A short illustrated account of Steinmetz is at Grems-Doolittle. Lenin’s extremely courteous letters to Steinmetz, written in 1922, are on http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/apr/10cps.htm
and http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/07b.htm

(4) German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), Welt im Wandel: Sicherheitsrisiko Klimawandel, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 2008. First published 6 June 2007; published by Earthscan in the UK and USA in 2008. Available in German on http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/cae/servlet/contentblob/389698/publicationFile/4501/ and in English on http://www.wbgu.de/fileadmin/templates/dateien/veroeffentlichungen/hauptgutachten/jg2007/wbgu_jg2007_kurz_engl.pdf

(5) Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845