Book Lauch: Clean Break

Clean Break: How Ordinary Citizens Turn Around Germany’s Energy System

How is it possible that Germany is abandoning nuclear energy and fossil fuels in favor of renewables in a stunning speed without encountering major political or social opposition? Especially in the US the German Energiewende (which translates roughly to “energy transformation”) is met with some astonishment and disbelief. Osha Gray Davidson, an American journalist and a Climate Media Fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, recently returned from a trip through Germany on which he met with citizens, businessmen, and decision-makers to discuss and understand the German Energiewende. His astonishing findings have been published in a book called Clean Break, which was presented and debated in a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on November 13th, in cooperation with Inside Climate News.

Davidson shared the panel with Anya Schoolman, Executive Director of the Community Power Network who is also involved with several solar co-ops in Washington, DC, Eric Roston, who is the sustainability editor for Bloomberg, and moderated by Arne Jungjohann, Program Director of the Environment and Global Dialogue Program at the Böll Foundation. The author talked about his experiences from his trip through Germany, underlining the importance of policies that support a decentralized and democratized generation of power. This way, everyone has an interest in seeing the energy transformation succeed while it is put on a stable social foundation that incorporates individual citizens, cooperatives, and municipalities. Another important part of the German energy transformation is the design of the feed-in tariff. It guarantees a certain price for every kilowatt-hour fed into the grid. As this guaranteed price is altered on a regular basis to reflect sinking costs for installation of renewables, it creates an incentive to invest in renewables sooner rather than later. In addition, the control over the payment of the tariff is largely removed from political considerations. This way, a climate of long-term investment security is created that is nearly absent from the US context, where the 50 states each have their own policies that are regularly changed depending on political majorities.

Anya Schoolman supported Davidson’s observations that institutional obstacles are holding renewables back in the US, by talking about her practical experience and difficulties she faced when trying to install solar panels in Washington, DC. She especially emphasized the challenges dealing with large power utilities who continue to have a huge influence on energy policies, which is reflected in lack of priority access for renewables in the grid.

According to Davidson, the success or failure of green energy comes down to making a broad social commitment to generating power through renewables. Only when all social actors voice a demand for change will the government turn to designing policies accordingly: “The critical part is that the German people decided to do this, then [the government] worked out the policy.” The fact that this can also happen in the US is underlined by Davidson’s experience when talking to Germans like Ursula Sladek, one of the early pioneers of a participatory approach towards renewables in Germany. When asking her what Americans could learn from the German experience with renewables, she simply answered “This is something very American, isn't it? The Americans are people who say: 'We can do it ourselves. '”

Clean Break is available in form of a Kindle eBook or downloadable as a PDF here.