Germany's cautionary, but hopeful, renewable energy tale | CJOnline.com

Transition from fossil fuels brings costs, grid concerns, but country remains committed

Posted: August 9, 2014 - 3:57pm

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ANDY MARSO/THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL

The Reichstag building houses the German parliament, or Bundestag, which recently changed the way renewable subsidies are doled out to make it more market-based.

By Andy Marso

andy.marso@cjonline.com

BERLIN — On a recent Monday morning, Jan Peter Klatt sat in his office in Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and strained to hear a recording of an interview with Kansas Sen. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona.

Knox was making one last unsuccessful pitch to repeal Kansas’ renewable energy standards by citing Germany, where he said the transition from fossil fuels to renewables was “de-industrializing” the nation.

“It isn’t,” Klatt says. “And especially it wouldn’t be de-industrializing for the States (now). We have to differentiate between the past and the future.”

The future German leaders imagine is one in which their innovations in solar and wind energy enable them to produce enough domestic electricity to power their nation cheaply and reliably regardless of international instability in a power-hungry world.

Klatt, an expert on the renewable transition’s economic impact, said those innovations are arriving, but Germans have shouldered a “high financial burden” in pioneering them.