Below are excerpts from an article from Slate about Germany.
Can you even imagine Germany leading?
That's how far behind the U.S. has fallen because we've allowed the ignorant to lead.
Isn't it time to stop them? Or shall we continue to shovel our hard-earned money into their pockets?
Twenty-two percent of Germany’s power is generated with renewables. Solar provides close to a quarter of that. The southern German state of Bavaria, population 12.5 million, has three photovoltaic panels per resident, which adds up to more installed solar capacity than in the entire United States.
With a long history of coal mining and heavy industry and the aforementioned winter gloom, Germany is not the country you’d naturally think of as a solar power. And yet a combination of canny regulation and widespread public support for renewables have made Germany an unlikely leader in the global green-power movement—and created a groundswell of small-scale power generation that could upend the dominance of traditional power companies.
The law guaranteed small hydroelectric power generators—mostly in Bavaria, a politically conservative area I like to think of as the Texas of Germany—a market for their electricity. The EEG required utility companies to plug all renewable power producers, down to the smallest rooftop solar panel, into the national grid and buy their power at a fixed, slightly above-market rate that guaranteed a modest return over the long term. The prices were supposed to balance out the hidden costs of conventional power, from pollution to decades of coal subsidies.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/alternative_energy/2013/03/solar_power_in_germany_how_a_cloudy_country_became_the_world_leader_in_solar.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_
No comments:
Post a Comment