Schönau im Schwarzwald, Germany — Coming off the twisting mountain road that cuts through the heart of the Black Forest, the village of Schönau looks like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales. Small shops and rustic beer gardens line narrow streets built for horses and foot traffic. Dairy cattle, a rare variety bred here centuries ago to be as sure-footed as mountain goats, graze on steep-pitched pastures high above the village. From the highway north of town, Schönau appears much as it did in the 12th century.
Viewed from the south, however, Schönau looks quite different. The sun glints blue off thousands of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels — small, grid-connected power plants owned by residents. The panels generate more electricity on sunny days than the village of 2,500 people consumes. If the bucolic view from the north is a reminder of the past, the second one, says Schönau resident Ursula Sladek, is a hopeful vision of the future, of a society transformed.
“With something new, a few people must always go first,” Sladek says through an interpreter. “The others come afterward.” She leans forward and stage-whispers in English: “But only if it works.”
If you ran into Sladek at the local Aldi grocery store, the word revolutionary would probably not come to mind. In her late 60s, with piercing blue eyes and straight gray hair, Sladek looks like the grandmother and former schoolteacher she is. But in the mid-1980s, in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear power-plant disaster, she spearheaded a local movement to achieve what she considered a reasonable, even modest, goal: that Schönau residents should decide how their electricity is generated.
Sladek and her neighbors didn’t know it at the time, but their battle with the local utility — and their challenge of the conventional wisdom about how an energy system should run — would become part of a nationwide technological and political movement called the Energiewende, or Energy Revolution. The Energiewende aims to abandon nuclear power and nearly eliminate fossil fuels as an energy source in Germany, the world’s fourth-largest industrial economy, with a population of 80 million. Nearly three decades after Schönau’s energy upset, about a quarter of the country’s power comes from renewable sources like wind, solar and biomass, the highest percentage of any large industrialized nation. By comparison, the United States gets just 13 percent of its electricity from renewables. Almost 25,000 wind turbines dot the German countryside, producing 52 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2014, enough to power the entire country of Colombia. (A terawatt-hour equals 1 million megawatt-hours.) More than a million rooftop solar systems, including those in Schönau, add another 30 TWh to the German grid.
