Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
was a danger that the co-generation plant (combined heat
and power) virus might spread westwards into the Federal
Republic.
the Network for the Decentralised Use of Energy, which
we had set up in November 1990 through the People's Chamber,
the highest organ of state power in the former East Germany, we
succeeded in instigating judicial review proceedings at the Federal
Constitutional Court against the “GDR power supply agreements”,
which had been drawn up by the electrical utilities in the West
with the intention of taking over the entire network. These
companies would not have been willing to run the risk of initiating
parallel proceedings against the Feed-In Law, for fear that both
lawsuits might be dealt with at the same time—in which case it
would have become only too apparent that the fundamental
structure of the German power industry dates back to the year
1941, when the NS-Regime was at its most brutal.
Our success: The impending lawsuit forced the electrical
utilities to hand back part of their assets to some local authorities.
On 27 October 1992—in several respects an important date in
the history of the Constitutional Court—it came to oral proceed-
ings. Not at the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, however, but
at the railway repair works in Stendal instead. Not only was the
venue itself out of the ordinary: the court surprised us all by
introducing a settlement proposal
Via
2
—an anomaly in its history.
By so doing, it managed to prevent the necessary reappraisal of
the laws governing the German energy sector, created during the
Third Reich. The court's president, Roman Herzog—who was
later granted the office of Federal President in recognition of this
settlement proposal—saw to it that the proceedings “ran dry”
by allowing the case to continue for too long. And so the goal was
achieved: One by one, the 164 East German plaintifs withdrew
their charges, after receiving “lucrative” ofers from the West
German energy supply industry, in keeping with the rule of
mechanics whereby machinery will only function if it is well
oiled—in other words, after allowing their own palms to be
sufficiently greased.
Rupert Scholz, chief negotiator for the German parliament in
the constitutional commission made up of both the Bundesrat
2
Jörg Henning, Transformations probleme nach der Wende am Beispiel der
Stadtwerke Halle GmbH, Forschungsberichte des Instituts für Soziologie,
Universität Halle, ISSN 0945-7011.
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