By annie shum | April 7, 2009
In 2008, even as Americans argue over whether renewable energy is a fantasy, Germany generated 14.2% of its electrical power from renewable resources. Already a leading player in so-called clean technology — the mix of environmentally benign power generation and environmentally friendly technologies — Germany may become the epicenter of the world’s next industrial revolution: the triumph of clean, cheap, sustainable electricity.
This article looks at how the German government and individuals helped such companies as Enercon, the world’s third-largest producer of wind generators, and Q-Cells, the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic cells, reach their present position, and what their gains might mean for the country and the world.
Bigger than Cars
At a time when most countries have hardly begun installing power-generating windmills, Germany has already installed 23,900 megawatts, making it the world’s largest home of windmills per capita. Germany also has an installed base of 3,830 megawatts of photovoltaic cells, making the country a world leader in solar power as well, despite its famously wet climate.
Already, renewable technologies provide some 170,000 jobs to the German economy. By 2020, some analysts estimate that clean technology, or “clean tech,” will be an even bigger industry in Germany — and globally, an industry rivaling or exceeding IT in historical importance. Products are good enough already that the installed base of solar panels and wind mills keeps climbing rapidly, and technological advances seem likely to accelerate that process.
For more details, see entire article at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2201
When Green Grows Up
Despite the technical challenges, some business scholars believe that the green boom is only beginning and will eventually be one of the great technological shifts of our age. Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist and teacher in Wharton’s executive education programs, contends that what is going on in Germany and other places in Europe right now is not just the creation of cleaner ways to generate electricity, but the foundation of a third industrial revolution.
Rifkin claims that just as in the 19th century, when the invention of the internal combustion engine combined with electrical communications to create an entirely new world of production and transportation, so now the birth of satellite communications and the Internet have prepared the way for new power generation technologies based on distributed rather than centralized power generation.
In contrast to many forecasters, Rifkin argues that these new technologies won’t mean getting along with less power, just producing it in different and more efficient ways. “Just as second generation information systems grid technologies allow businesses to connect thousands of desktop computers, creating far more distributed computing power than even the most powerful centralized computers that exist, millions of local producers of renewable energy … can potentially produce far more distributed power than the older centralized forms of energy — oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear — that we currently rely on,” he said in a lecture last year.
Wind agrees that something big is going on in Germany right now in terms of alternative energy and green development. “They’re doing it,” he says. “The reality is, they’re moving forward.”
Published: April 07, 2009 in Knowledge@Wharton
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