Consultant Dan
17 February 2012
Building a Clean Energy Future, with Hans-Josef Fell
This morning I’m writing this post from a small but excellent breakfast event, ‘Building a Clean Energy Future’, in Melbourne. The headline speaker is Hans-Josef Fell, a member of the Bundestag, representing the Greens Parliamentary Group.
Brendan Condon, Chairman of Climate Positive, organized the event. He says that Australia has a great future as a renewables powerhouse but is neglecting to invest and falling behind the rest of the world.
As Brendan says, ‘We have the highest per capita renewable energy reserves but we have almost the highest per capita emissions.’
Hans-Josef Fell MP created the German Renewable Energy legislation, together with Hermann Scheer, which has been the basis of the world’s most successful renewables industry plan. He now works across the EU, advising on energy and innovation. Fell is a founder of the Energy Watch Group, which gives independent advice on energy futures to politicians, because they cannot trust the old energy companies. Fell is a key driver of research policy in the Bundestag.
Fell says that energy is the key driver of the global economic and ecological crises facing the world. Behind the headlines about the EU crisis is the fundamental fact that fossil fuels are becoming more scarce and more expensive.
Hans-Josef Fell explains that the EU’s oil bill rose dramatically between 2009 and 2010, from €280 billion to €400 billion. This is one of the deep causes of the EU economic crisis. In Germany, which is the richest nation in Europe, poor people are already unable to afford fuel oil to heat their houses through the winter.
Fell says that the solution is to move to 100% renewable energy, to save the economy. Unlike most politicians, he is brave enough to bring up Peak Oil and explains how it increases the destabilization caused by climate change.
On the climate policy side, Fell rejects the UN’s 2C climate target as dangerous and says the goal has to be zero and then beyond zero, to bring greenhouse gases back to their pre-industrial level.
Fell has the track record to demonstrate that sustainable, renewable energy is a necessary pillar of a robust global economy.
The core of the German energy legislation is the Feed in Tariff (FiT), which he co-designed. A FiT pays the generator of renewable energy a small fee for all energy they produce. This creates industry certainty, stimulates investment and drives technological innovation.
Fell tells us that 80% of German voters support the FiT, because it has changed the society in beneficial ways. (This matches both Australian and US polls for renewables industry funding.) The German FiT has allowed communities to start their own energy companies and also provided incomes directly to rural communities, to farm wind and solar ‘crops’.
Mark Ogge, Beyond Zero Emissions communications director, spoke next. He told the meeting that Origin Energy and the other big generator-retailers have sabotaged the politics of a FiT for Australia in the near term. The Australian Greens are the only party committed to a well-designed, national FiT. Ogge calls for a campaign to explain the benefits of a FiT, putting it on the political agenda.
The next speakers will be Bob Welsh, previous CEO of VicSuper and Tosh Szatow, ex CSIRO. I’m expecting good questions, because the audience includes smart people from finance, property and government, who are clearly impressed by Fell’s story.
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