Neuerkirch cuts a picture-perfect idyllic German village. Half-timbered houses mark the two sides of cobblestoned streets that snake into the surrounding hills, covered in green and with neat patches of forest.

On a sunny Tuesday April morning at the village’s Gemeindehaus—German for town hall—Bertram Fleck, a jovial man in his sixties told a gathering of 20 odd people, including journalists from 11 different countries, “The money of the village should remain in the village.”

Fleck, a former chief executive of Rhein-Hunsrueck district where Neuerkirch village is located, said he used this famous quote of Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, the pioneer of global cooperative movement, to motivate his district’s people to take part in the German energy transition programme, known as “Energiewende.”

The district he once headed lies in the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which brands itself as a “pioneer” of the Energiewende movement, among the country’s 16 federal states.

Germany has started this epic shift towards renewable energy and has attained success in less than a decade. Now it operates one of the most reliable electricity grids in the world with wind and solar energy accounting for supplying one-third of its total mix.

By transforming Energiewende from the possibility of a “considerable success”, the world’s fourth largest economy has busted the notion that solar and wind power are “too unreliable” to become base load power sources.

With climate change becoming a reality and the market of fossil fuel in a never-ending fickle phase, a lot of countries are switching to renewables. But what makes Germany’s attempt a tad more successful than others is the democratic aspect: the ownership of its energy generators is transitioning from corporations to SMEs and citizens.

Standing on a strong policy support system, general citizens in the country are decentralising the energy mix and installing smaller renewable power projects. This makes Germany slowly but “quite steadily” moving away from coal, fossil fuel and nuclear power.

In the last year alone, about 42 per cent of the renewable energy establishments were installed by the citizens and energy cooperatives. If it were counted as a company, citizen solar energy in Germany alone would now rank within Europe’s top 15 largest energy retailers, producing 79 terawatt hours of electricity.

Energy consumers turning into producers

It didn’t happen easily or overnight. People like Fleck needed to battle hard to convince those who, for long, had been accustomed to electricity and heating supplied to their homes by the state at "reasonable prices".

The motivation is clear, said Fleck. “We want to convert Germany’s energy import costs into regional jobs and value creation through energy efficiency and renewable energies. Our objective is to transfer energy import worth Euro 290 million into regional value creation.”

Neuerkirch and its neighbouring village, Külz, have already abandoned their old fossil fuel heating system for a 100% renewable heating system—a biomass plant that supplies 75% of the energy and a solar thermal plant provides for the rest.

That’s just the stories of two villages. The entire district of Rhein-Hunsrueck, which has around 137 villages like these two, has now become an energy exporter. A decade ago, in 2007, out of the annual 421 million kilowatt-hour power consumption by the district, the share of local renewable energy produce accounted for about 27 per cent—130 million kilowatt-hour.

In 2017, against the total power consumption of 468 million kilowatt-hour, the district produced 1.398 billion kilowatt-hour power from renewable sources, making the share of renewable energy a staggering 298 per cent.

“We are now happy that we don’t have to be supplied by Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia,” the mayor of Neuerkirch, Volker Wichter, said jokingly.

“It was never an easy task,” Marcus Conrad, the mayor of Wörrstadt, a town of Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate state, told The Independent at the municipality building of the town.

Under Conrad’s mayorship—an office which he holds through elections since 2003—Wörrstadt, in 2012, became the first municipality in Germany to produce and consume 100 per cent of its own electricity from renewable energy sources–a goal that formerly had been set to be achieved by 2017.

Furthermore, the community’s energy and climate protection efforts earned Wörrstadt the European Energy Award (EEA), along with the title of Germany’s first European energy and climate protection municipality.

“The money that we earn from our renewable energy initiatives also helps us to undertake several programmes for the development of the community,” Conrad said.

Understanding the 'Energiewende'

While Germany’s Energiewende is a topic intensely reported on and discussed in Germany, it is not very familiar outside of this European nation, much less to South-Asian countries that are still struggling to ensure energy and power access to all of their citizens.

Clean Energy Wire (CLEW), a Berlin-based independent non-profit, non-partisan service for journalists and the interested public, has decided to bridge the gap of knowledge and hence organised a media tour for selected journalists from across the world to take a trip into the heart of Rhineland-Palatinate on the third week of April.

The three-day trip had scheduled meetings with several leading energy experts, local mayors of the state, representatives of energy cooperatives, and protesters and policymakers.

Sven Egenter, the executive director of CLEW, accompanied the journalists on the tour. He told The Independent that it’s not easy to understand the Energiewende. “It stands on a German policy with which it pushed for solar and wind energy and set a feed-in-tariff system that guaranteed a return on investment for 20 years,” he said.

Explaining, Egenter said, Germany’s renewable-subsidy scheme pays an “energy-producing citizen” a set price for every kilowatt-hour of electricity s/he produces with his/her solar panels and sells into the grid. This encourages households to install PV panels on their roofs, either feeding the electricity they produced onto the grid or consuming it themselves.

The wind turbine, meanwhile, is too expensive to be owned by an individual; it is owned by a co-operative that sometimes do it in partnership with seasoned business entities. Each citizen or organisation that has made an investment in the wind turbine project owned by the co-operative gets a guaranteed return.

A CLEW factsheet says that since 2012, operators of renewable power stations can choose to sell electricity directly on the exchange and secure a market premium payment (the difference between the normal feed-in tariff and the average electricity price at the exchange).

The factsheet terms the Renewable Energy Act that provides grid priority for renewables “an important ingredient for Germany’s energy transition". The Act stipulates that electricity from wind, solar and biomass gets access to the grid ahead of conventional power. The law also provides that in times of excess supply, conventional power plants must ramp down production.

The Act ensures that grid operators “must not disconnect wind turbines and solar arrays, unless the stability of the power network is threatened”.

Additionally, grid operators are obliged to “connect new renewable power facilities to the relevant power grid and if necessary even expand the network to accommodate biomass units, photovoltaics, and wind turbines. If they do not comply with their obligation, renewable producers are entitled to compensation, paid by grid operators,” said the CLEW factsheet.

Energy politics

While the Renewable Energy Act gives a better footing for the renewables, politicians in Berlin, pressured by conventional power producers—which didn’t see Energiewende materialising in such a pace—are pressing Merkel’s government to slow things down.

According to the book “Energy Democracy” written by German energy expert and Green Party loyalist Arne Jungjohann and the Germany-based US blogger Craig Morris, Energiewende is endorsed by all of Germany’s parties, yet the government has “sort of” turned its back on the citizen movement responsible for its success.

The book argues that Berlin wants to slow the Energiewende down, not least by letting the beleaguered conventional big power producers in on the action. After years of allowing “large” investment incentives for citizens and communities, the government now has endorsed auctions, something tailored to well-heeled investors.

The authors of the book, however, said the success of Germany’s energy transition has changed more than just the composition of its energy mix. The citizen-led power production, for the first time in history, has made energy something in which ordinary people have a say.

Thomas Griese, secretary to the Rhineland-Palatinate state ministry for energy and environment, spoke with the journalist during the media trip. He told The Independent many economically underdeveloped regions in Germany are now earning money by tapping energy from renewables.

“The core idea of our country’s energy policy is a locally owned and decentralised energy transition, based on citizen engagement,” he said.

About his state—Rhineland-Platinate—Griese said, “It is one of the forerunners in the energy transition in Germany. Now about 48 per cent of the power production in Rhineland-Platinate is based on renewable sources.”

The state, he said, has not only been a forerunner in the development of renewable energies, but also in “supporting citizen energy cooperatives, which are an important factor in many communities.”

At present, there are 42 citizen energy cooperatives Rhineland-Palatinate which are federated, to a large extent, in a network, he said. “Our ministry supports this network financially," he added.

Griese said that while Germany has been a frontrunner in embracing renewables, a good number of countries across the world has overtaken Germany in terms of “expansion of renewable energies".

In 2017, for the first time in history, he said, “There were higher investments in solar power than in fossil energies, nuclear power, and wind energy, in sum.”

He hoped from the new government more courage and political commitment “to regain global leadership not only to achieve the climate targets, but also to gain back a leading position in technology”.