How the Electricity Feed-In Law (Stromeinspeisungsgesetz) Came to Be Passed by the German Parliament, Enabling Renewable Energies to Establish Their Position in the Market - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 486

our attention on renewable energy sources alone will do nothing
to ease the burden on our environment without the necessary
structural changes within the energy sector. Those in favour of a
centralised system know all too well that people with no knowledge
of the past have no future. After all, there used to be numerous
decentralised electricity producers both in Germany and Japan,
but these were brutally eliminated and expropriated and are
now more or less forgotten. And the centralists are sure to gain
control of the present situation too. If, in the decentralist camp,
we have no leaders with a knowledge of the history of our electricity
production and supply networks, then the ripe fruits of all our
labours are simply going to fall onto the laps of the proponents of
centralism. Hence their strategy first of all to undermine the long-
established hydroelectric power sector because after that it will
be easy for them to gain control of the wind energy sector with its
lack of historical awareness.
Those in favour of centralism cannot forget for one moment
that it was the decentralised hydroelectric power industry under
the leadership of Manfred Lüttke, vice-president of the German
Renewable Energy Association, who bestowed on them the
incredibly successful and—for their intents and purposes—highly
dangerous Feed-In Law of 7 December 1990, written down clearly
on a single sheet of standard-size paper! In 2002, Chancellor
Schröder's old government was literally washed back into power
by a very narrow majority as a result of both the severe flooding
caused when the River Elbe ran at an all-time high and the threat
of war in Iraq. The advocates of centralism among the realists in
the Green Party subsequently informed the Renewable Energy
Association that a new generation was now in power and that
the time had come for the older generation to remove themselves
quietly, important though their role may have been in the past.
The association should now open itself up to the financial market,
to large size wind farming, monocultures and ofshore wind power.
Having served on the board at the Renewable Energy Association
from its founding on 14 December 1991 until April 2007, I feel
obliged to point out the reasons why it was founded in the first
place and the aims it originally pursued. I continue to support those
aims and promote them as a directive for the association's policies
in the future. From 1962 to 1968, I worked at the Institute for