REPORTER: David O’Shea

In the village of Schönau in the beautiful Black Forest of Southern Germany, there's a remarkable energy revolution under way. And it's fitting that the Doctor Eva Stegen is showing me around in her electric car.

REPORTER: How exciting.

DOCTOR EVA STEGEN:  These small kids are very astonished and ask their grandmas, “Is it a children’s car?” And I sometimes reply, “Yes it is. It’s for the children’s future.”

Everywhere you look there are solar panels which provide twice the amount of solar power as the national average. That power is then sold to an independent renewable energy company, who distribute it to their growing list of clients.

DOCTOR EVA STEGEN:  It's like a virus.

Doctor Stegen is the company's public relations officer.

REPORTER: I've never seen a church with a roof like that.

DOCTOR EVA STEGEN: What the people in Schönau make is a solar revolution. And they connected the first kilowatts on the roof of the church without permission.

Shortly after they installed the panel, the Government introduced legislation allowing individuals and this church to sell the power they generate.

DOCTOR EVA STEGEN:  They started because they wanted to help and afterwards when this law came, then it was economically interesting for all the people who invested the money together in this.

FRANK, ACCOUNTANT (Translation):  Here you see the electricity intake from the five systems.

Down the road, Frank the accountant also has a roof covered in solar panels which earns him some extra cash.

REPORTER: Does it make good economic sense? Good money for you?
 
FRANK (Translation):  Yes, you earn a bit of money. The set-up is economically viable and you get an annual return of around 2 to 3%.

The local hotelier has a gas-fired co-generational plant which produces all the heat and electricity he needs. What he doesn't consume here, he sells to the company, EWS.

HOTELIER (Translation):  On Fridays we don’t cook lunch, the electricity goes into the EWS grid. When we’re busy, we take electricity from the EWS.

And the list of small-scale energy producers working with EWS goes on and on. But it wasn't always like this. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a group of Schönau residents literally seized power by buying the local power plant and turning it in to the EWS cooperative. It was the only way they could ensure their energy was not derived from the nuclear reactors they now feared and despised and they've been in control of their own energy destiny ever since.

URSULA SLADEK, EWS: I think you can have solar panels everywhere in the world. It's a very important source for electricity.

Ursula Sladek, one of the founders of EWS is a former school teacher who once knew nothing about energy. She's now an expert.

URSULA SLADEK: If we look at the cost we had more costs for nuclear energy than for all renewable energies together. We must not forget that. And even today, even Germany, the nuclear energy gets more support, more financial support than solar energy.

For her ground breaking work, last year Sladek won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize and an audience with President Obama. She took the opportunity to give him a book she’d published.

URSULA SLADEK: It's against the global warming and it is also against nuclear power and so I want to give that to you. He looked like, "Why is she doing that?"

Ursula’s company offers incentives to encourage renewable energy producers in Schönau to sell to them rather than to those using nuclear power.

URSULA SLADEK: It’s a windmill that belongs to citizens but we buy the electricity from that windmill and sell it to our customers.

REPORTER: Why can't they sell it themselves to the grid?

URSULA SLADEK: Of course, they can sell it to the grid, but they get a little more from us, so they sell it to us.

At the other end of the country, an hour's drive from Berlin and the former East Germany, there's another small village forging an independent energy future.

WERNER FROHWITTER: As you can see Feldheim is a very unspectacular place. It's a normal little village. With a fire brigade. A little church. An old school house.

Under its unremarkable surface, there's something remarkable going on in the village of Feldheim. It's the very first village in Germany to power itself directly from electricity generated on site. Werner Frohwitter works for the company Energiequelle which set it up.

WERNER FROHWITTER: We have some more villages that are energy self-sufficient but they mostly feed in their electricity into the national grid, and get it out from another point at the sockets. We have our own connection from the wind farm into the village and into each individual home and this makes a difference. There’s no price dictate any longer – you produce your own energy. You use the national grid but you can use it yourself. It makes you independent from big companies from oil, from coal, from strong economic power and from many other things.

This is the bio gas plant.

As well as wind power, there's pig power.

WERNER FROHWITTER: Some 600 sows.

Not only do they produce meat for the farmers, they also produce a lot of liquid manure or slurry for the bio gas plant.

WERNER FROHWITTER: It is not very delicious. After all, it is shit. Bacteria find it tasty and it produce gases and digestive gases like you and me when we eat beans. And this is a fuel. You can use it and that’s all. There's no secret in it.

The gas drives a generator and feeds heat and electricity in to each home in the village and the national grid. Along with all the power it produces, Feldheim also generates a lot of international interest.

WERNER FROHWITTER: Come in. A lot of visitors from Japan here recently.

REPORTER: Since Fukushima?

WERNER FROHWITTER: Before, but more since Fukushima. Fuanishi Kata from Fukushima – it was a family a mother with her 2 children.

Back in Schönau, Doctor Stegen is also dealing with a steady stream of Japanese visitors. She's explaining to some journalists from Tokyo how certain events lead to spikes in the number of people signing up to get their clean energy from EWS.

DOCTOR EVA STEGEN:  You see, here on March 11…

REPORTER: It starts going vertically?

DOCTOR EVA STEGEN:  Kind of vertically…so that the echo of Fukushima.

Not long after the Fukushima disaster, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany would close all of its nuclear reactors. It was a brave decision, responding to widespread community concern about the safety of their own reactors.

URSULA SLADEK: I think if there had not been so much activists against nuclear power, Mrs Merkel would never have taken this position. So it was part Fukushima, but it was a large part the German activists because they feared not to be in the government anymore. So this was the real reason, I think.

But euphoria of the news didn't last long. Just as the green movement was looking forward to further growth, last month the government announced a 30% cut in the subsidy for small producers selling power to the grid. They hope this will address problems of supply and demand. The news hasn't gone down well with the renewable energy industry which has turned out en masse in Berlin to protest.

POLITICIAN 1 (Translation):  The phasing out of nuclear energy cannot be achieved without subsidising renewable energy or we’ll be going back 100 years. We don’t want to do that and we can’t do that.

POLITICIAN 2 (Translation): 53,000 new jobs with a future, highly qualified work. Nowhere else in the world has renewable energy been such a success!

Jürgen Trittin from the German Greens says the cut will strangle the young industry.

JÜRGEN TRITTIN: Renewable energies in Germany are quite a success story. We save about 126 million tonnes of CO2 each year. We created more than 400,000 new jobs. And for consumers relevant renewables now stabilised the energy prices. And we don’t want that this project be killed.

REPORTER: There's a lot of noise. A lot of angry people here today?


JÜRGEN TRITTIN: Yeah these are people are full of fear for their jobs.

On stage, Trittin tells the crowd that the government and the power companies want to do away with renewable energy by stealth.

JÜRGEN TRITTIN: It’s quite simply about pushing renewable energy out of the market. They’re trying to bring to an end a unique success story.

But those pushing for the subsidy cuts say it's critical to slow the rapid growth in small-scale renewable energy production.

PROFESSOR GEORG ERDMANN: We don't need more. It is not possible to have a larger system. It means that it would be stupid to build more. So that means we have to reduce this capacity.

Energy economist Professor Georg Erdmann has been appointed by Chancellor Angela Merkel to evaluate the industry.

PROFESSOR GEORG ERDMANN: The change in the energy law is urgent because if we don't change it in the right way, it will be very difficult in the future to make this a competitive industry or market oriented industry. But, of course, it makes from an energy point of view it makes no sense to do small scale solutions. We need overall solutions because in the end the system becomes more efficient, more reliable and in the end cheaper.

Germany has set ambitious renewable energy targets over the coming decades. And the Professor Erdmann warns if they don't get it right, they may have to break the promise to shut the nuclear reactors.

REPORTER: So there's still the possibility the government might reverse that decision?

PROFESSOR GEORG ERDMANN: We have to work that this will not be happening but at the end if we are not successful in replacing backup systems we have to expect that the government, one future government will have to revise – maybe extend the running time of the last nuclear power stations before they are shut down.

And that won't go down well with those pushing for a complete rethink of the way we produce and consume power.

URSULA SLADEK: You have to save 85% greenhouse gases until the year 2050 in Germany. 85%. This is enormous.

REPORTER: The same argument in Australia is met by an answer which is, "Why would we do that when China and India are going to continue emitting?" There's no point.

URSULA SLADEK: No. I think this is really wrong because somebody has to start. It's the same thing, whatever you do, one must be the first, and then the others come afterwards.

YALDA HAKIM: Reporting from a powered-up Germany. They're having the sort of debate that hasn't even begun in Australia yet.


Reporter/Camera
DAVID O’SHEA

Producers
FRAN TINLEY
VICTORIA STROBL

Researcher
MELANIE MORRISON

Editors
WAYNE LOVE
DAVID POTTS

Translations/Subtitling
ROSAMUND ZIEGERT

Original Music Composed by VICKI HANSEN