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144 Climate 11 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS Read the text about how bioenergy enables some German villages to be part of the ‘energy revolution’. Complete the sentences (1–8) using a maximum of four words. Write your answers in the spaces provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. 29  Jühnde’s experience shows how the energy sector in Europe’s largest economy, long domi- nated by large utilities, is being challenged by an unlikely competitor: a swarm of households and small-scale investors who are producing and selling renewable energy.  Germany is committed to switching off its nuclear reactors by 2022, along with slashing greenhouse- gas emissions. Meeting both goals requires one of themost ambitious expansions of renewable energy in the world. Last year, the country generated 22% of its electricity from renewable sources, up from 8% 10 years earlier. That is also roughly twice as much as the U.S., the U.K. or Japan, which analysts say have less ambitious goals. Germany’s aim under its ‘Energiewende’, which translates roughly as ‘energy revolution’, is to generate at least 35% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and at least 80% by midcentury, while cutting its total energy consumption in half by 2050. Supporters of the strategy say it will make Germany a pioneer in an energy transformation that will serve as a blueprint for the rest of the world. Critics say the approach is imposing high costs on households and industries that already pay significantly more for electricity than their counterparts in other advanced economies do.  Residents of Jühnde, a rural village of 750 people, say their investment has paid off. In 2004, about three quarters of Jühnde’s households formed a cooperative and invested in a bioenergy plant and infrastructure, with help from government grants and low-interest loans from the German de- velopment bank KfW. The facility, known as com- bined heat and power plant, or CHP plant, turns local biomass supplied by the village’s farmers – such as manure, plants and wood – into energy. Jühnde’s success and government initiatives to promote green energy helped inspire similar projects around the country. Today, there are 92 such self-sufficient ‘bioenergy villages’ in Germany, and another 350 rural areas or small towns have begun to make or are studying similar investments.  Small-scale energy producers are dominating the growth of Germany’s renewable-energy sector. Households with solar panels on their roofs, or who tap local farms for biofuels, account for 35% of the country’s renewable electricity supply, while farmers and green-energy companies provide another 25%, according to a Bremen-based research firm. “Germany has turned the traditional one-way street – from energy producers to con- sumers – upside down” as households become energy suppliers as well as users, said Christoph Burger, an energy specialist at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.  Germany’s energy revolution grew out of a decision by the centre-left government of then- Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2000 to phase out nuclear power and subsidise the rapid expansion of renewable energy. The nuclear-exit plan was thrown out in 2010 by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative-led coalition, which wanted to keep nuclear reactors operating for longer. But in early 2011, after Japan’s nuclear disaster at Fukushima, she bowed to popular pressure and said Germany would shut its last reactors in 2022.  But the energy shift carries a high price tag: Households and smaller businesses are encumbered with a surcharge on energy bills that funds subsidies for renewables, while energy-intensive companies are exempt in the hopes they won’t take production elsewhere. As a consequence, electricity prices in Germany are roughly three times higher than in the U.S., and among the highest in the European Union.  Villagers in Jühnde, meanwhile, have launched a new project: They want to use their plant’s surplus electricity to fuel electric cars, in addition to selling to the national grid. The German government wants to get one million electric cars on the road by 2020. “Electro-mobility is the last piece in the puzzle” to reach energy self-sufficiency, experts say. German villages and bioenergy: small investors challenging big utilities? JÜHNDE, Germany: Nine years ago, the residents of this small German village got together to build a bioenergy plant fuelled with plants and manure. Today, the plant supplies all of Jühnde’s heat and allows the village to sell surplus electricity to Germany’s national grid. Explore reading: Bioenergy villages in Germany Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv