How East Germany Cleaned Up Dirty Power

The formerly Communist country has transitioned from brown coal to more renewables
November 3, 2014 |By Umair Irfan and ClimateWire
BERLINFrom 200 miles above, Canadian astronaut Chris
Hadfield looked out a window of the International Space
Station at the shimmering lights below and snapped a photo of
Germany's capital.
At night, the city's streetlamps trace the roads splaying from
the city center like a spiderweb. The lights and the darkness in
between chronicle the city's modern history.
But the most conspicuous relic of the once-divided city is in
the lights themselves.
"Amazingly, I think the light bulbs still show the East/West
division from orbit," Hadfield wrote in a Facebook post last
year.
On the left side, corresponding to West Berlin, the lights show
up as grayish-blue compared to the amber-colored lights in the
eastern part of the city. Where they meet traces the path for the
12-foot-high, graffiti-coated concrete barrier that divided
Berliners for 29 years.

Lingering reminder of a divided past: The

mismatch between the electrical systems of West
and East Germany can still be seen in Berlin's
streetlights. Blue lights for West Berlin contrast
with the gold lights of East Berlin.
Credit: NASA/Chris Hadfield

Though the wall itself fell beneath sledgehammers and

bulldozers, reduced to a two-brick-wide memorial running
through the city, the ghost of a divided country still haunts Germany's energy systems.

From power plants to transmission lines, Germany has spent the last 25 years erasing the
differences between east and west, pouring billions into energy infrastructure.
Among the world's most ambitious CO2 cuts
However, the country as a whole is now aiming for some of the most aggressive climate and
energy targets in the world under the "Energiewende," or energy transition. Germany's goal is to
switch off all of its nuclear reactors by 2022 and generate 80 percent of its electricity from
renewables by 2050. At the same time, the German government set a greenhouse gas emissions
reduction target of 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.
The unification process offers some insight into how the country can achieve its ambitions:
Under the German Democratic Republic, East Germany annually mined 300 million tons of
lignite, or brown coal. Lignite is much dirtier to extract and burn than harder coal varieties, but

it's cheap and abundant in Germany, and the GDR fulfilled 70 percent of its energy demand from
it, including electricity, heat and even transportation.
Another 10 percent of the energy supply came from Soviet-designed nuclear reactors. The grid
was centralized, with large plants distributing power to population and industrial centers
throughout the east. The Communist GDR government planned and managed the energy system
from the top down.
All of this crumbled along with the wall.
Right after unification, officials shut down all East German nuclear reactors and halted
construction on a new one, citing safety concerns. A new utility formed in the east to carve up
the remaining carcass of the GDR's energy industry, buying up state-owned generators and
transmission lines at cheap prices.
"After this liberalization of the market overnight, a big chunk of the lignite industry went
bankrupt," explained Felix Matthes, research coordinator for energy and climate policy at the
Institute for Applied Ecology (ko-Institut) in Berlin.
Many of the old East German power stations could not compete on the open market and went
offline. Redundant systems were scrapped and power generation moved away from
centralization toward distributed municipal utilities, many of which decided to build their own
gas-fired cogeneration plants.
Over time, Cold War-era coal plants yielded to new, cleaner, more efficient coal-fired generators
as investment drawn in by favorable tax breaks poured in from western Germany and around the
world. The German government, however, paid for cleanup and rehabilitation of open-pit lignite
mines.
It took a few more years for the transmission grid to unite. West Berlin remained an electrical
island until the city installed interconnects in 1995. The grid operator in eastern Germany,
50Hertz, did not respond to requests for comment.
Riding the highs and lows of solar
Meanwhile, the first iteration of the country's renewable energy feed-in tariff, which passed the
Bundestag in 1991, went into effect. Solar and wind energy found a comfortable home in the east
because some cities saw their populations plummet as local factories closed due to stiff market
competition.
This left an overbuilt, costly energy system with little revenue going to big energy companies to
support upkeep, let alone upgrades. Communities in the new eastern Lnder, or federal states,
responded with energy cooperatives, building wind turbines, installing rooftop solar panels and
constructing biomass generators to meet their own needs.
Clean energy only ramped up further when Germany's Renewable Energy Act (EEG) passed in
2000, and as solar manufacturing took hold, East Germans rode the highs and lows of the

industry's boom, bust and renewal. The region is also home to one-third of Germany's wind
energy capacity.
Though renewable energy supplied 28.5 percent of electricity consumption throughout the whole
country in the first half of this year, the share rose above 40 percent in the former GDR.
Shuttered factories, decommissioned fossil power plants, increasing renewable energy
penetration, efficiency upgrades and a declining population all added up to a big cut in
greenhouse gas emissions in the east. During the decade after reunification, German carbon
pollution fell 15 percent. In the eastern Lnder, power-sector emissions declined by 43 percent
between 1990 and 1995.
These advances exacted a dear price from the reunited nation. "It has not been free of charge,"
Matthes said. "It has cost the German taxpayer 1.5 trillion up until now."
East Germans, in particular, suffered when their state-subsidized electricity rates tripled, rising to
the market price that West Germans paid. The gross domestic product in the region shrank by
one-third in the two years immediately after the wall fell.
Some of the investment in East German energy also had unintended consequences, since they
arose before climate change entered the public conscience. The coal power plant fleet is much
newer in the east, meaning it still has decades to spew more carbon dioxide, while many fossil
power plants in the west are coming up for retirement, opening up the possibility of replacing
them with something cleaner.
Energy companies still mine roughly 80 million tons of lignite in the east. This summer, mining
companies received approval to expand open-pit operations, sparking international protests
(Greenwire, Aug. 25).
Managing high levels of intermittent power
Nonetheless, the overall German economy has grown over the past two decades and is now the
largest in Europe. And despite the high levels of intermittent renewable energy, the Council of
European Energy Regulators found that Germany has the most reliable electric grid on the
continent.
"In a way, eastern Germany is an interesting case for the German Energiewende, because on one
hand, you do have a lot of coal, but on the other hand, you have a lot of renewables," said Patrick
Graichen, executive director of Agora Energiewende, an energy think tank in Berlin. "If you
want to understand how to manage a fluctuating [renewable energy] system, eastern Germany is
already at high shares."
Like reunification, the Energiewende arouses a sense of solidarity among Germans, despite the
fact that the costs fall to the ratepayer (ClimateWire, Oct. 22).
And public officials are not backing away from their lofty objectives, even though the rest of the
European Union agreed last month to a weaker target of a 40 percent reduction in emissions by

2030. Last week, the German environment ministry announced it is considering plans to shutter
some coal-fired power plants to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
As for Berlin's lights, the distinction may fade as the city replaces mercury and sodium-vapor
lamps with more efficient LEDs. The German capital is also home to nearly 44,000 gas lamps,
more than half of those remaining in the world, and activist groups like Gaslicht-Kultur are
lobbying to keep them lit. With some of these fixtures dating back to the 19th century, the lights
illuminate a part of the country's history that Berliners don't want to forget.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC.
www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500