Wind on the Wires1 - Smart Grid (R) Evolution: Electric Power Struggles - page 155

security and rural economic development are also important rationales for developing wind
power.
German wind development is a key part of the national Energiewende that was adopted
as official policy in 2011 by Angela Merkel's government. Rooted in a strong German
antinuclear movement that has been a powerful political presence since the 1970's, the
Energiewende movesGermanytoarenewables-basedenergysystemwithouteithernuclear
or fossil fuels. When the German Green Party rose to prominence in the 1990's on a
platform promoting - among other things - the end of nuclear power generation, some
considereditanextremeposition.Asthepartybecamepartofthegoverningcoalition,what
was once a fringe idea gained mainstream acceptance. In 2002, the Schroder government
made a decision to phase out all nuclear plants, although at this time no deadline was set.
After the nuclear disaster in the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011, antinuclear sentiment
soared and Angela Merkel's government announced the closing of all German nuclear
plants by 2022; the Energiewende was passed and became official policy, promising an
aggressive transformation of the energy system and targeting greenhouse gas reductions of
40 percent between 1990 and 2020.
6.6.1 Building Wind Power in Germany
While the current situation highlights the perils of rapid development and the additional
complexity of a nuclear phaseout, the German government had been a leader in wind
turbine research and development for decades (discussed in Section 6.2 ). In the 1980's
Germany set goals for building 100 MW of wind, but installed capacity remained low. In
the fall of 1990, the Bundestag (the German Parliament) spurred widespread deployment
when they adopted the Electricity Feed-in Law ( Stromeinspeisungsgesetz ). This feed-in
tariff required that utilities connect wind projects to the grid and compensate the wind
generators at 90 percent of the average electricity retail sale price. Coupled with
low-interest twenty-year loans, these generous incentives spurred the first large-scale wind
development in the country. Some Lander (the sub-national states in Germany) provided
additional incentives for wind development. By 1991, Germany had installed 50 MW
of wind power; by the end of 2000, this had grown to 1,750 MW. Initially, many of
the wind projects were small; some were only two to three 500 kW turbines and many
were owned by local cooperatives or local farmers. As project size grew, the turbine size
increased to 1.1 MW by 2000; by this point many of the companies implementing these
projects were financed by investors from outside the community where the turbine was
located. The relative impact of the incentive package also grew over the decade; the feed-in
tariff remained strong, but costs of wind turbines decreased by 40 percent. This evolution