On 29 April 1998, the German energy market was ‘liberalized’. From one day to the next, former monopoly power providers saw their markets opened up to the compe­tition; after 60 years of monopoly service, customers could now (temporarily) look forward to competition. They could choose their own power provider. The effects of liberalization were drastic. […]

Buildings from the 1960s and earlier require much more heating energy than more recent buildings. Modernizing these build­ings to fulfil current building standards is therefore crucial in our solar strategy because the greatest savings potential is here – in Germany, roughly 20 per cent of overall current energy consumption could be offset through renovation. Of […]

H. C. Binswanger, the former director of the Institute of Economics and Ecology at Saint Gallen College in Switzerland, wrote several years ago calling wind power ‘the wrong alternative’. The main problem he has with wind power is ‘visual emissions’ and the negative impact of wind farms ‘when wind turbines are a blight on entire […]

Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy that could round off the spectrum of renew­ables; rather, it is a secondary energy carrier that first has to be created from another source of energy. If electricity is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen by means of electrolysis, more energy has to be used […]

In Germany, eight companies dominated the power market up to 1998, when the market was liberalized. That year, RWE, PreussenElektra, VEAG, EnBW, Bayernwerk AG, VEW, HEW and BEWAG generated 85 per cent of the electricity in Germany. They mainly had two ways of marginalizing small competitors: • Predatory pricing kept highly efficient, environmentally friendly cogeneration […]

A distinction is made between two basic types of policy instruments in environmental policy: on the one hand, we have command – and-control approaches, which tell companies how much they can emit, what exactly they can emit, and what kind of equipment may be used; on the other, we have free-market instruments, such as taxes, […]

Considerable investments will have to be made for our energy supply system to become sustainable; renewables will have to make up a large share of our supply, and energy applications will have to become much more efficient. These upfront invest­ments are offset over the long term by lower energy costs and independence from fossil energy […]

How it works Conventional insulation prevents the trans­fer of heat between the outside and the inside. But when sunlight hits a fapade, it heats up the building’s membrane. Instead of preventing this heat from entering the building, transparent insulation channels the heat to an absorber layer on the inside of the wall. The heat is […]