( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany’s boom in stationary batteries linked to solar PV systems accelerated last year, doubling the total number of units to more than one million, reports solar industry association BSW. The batteries have a combined capacity of 12 gigawatt-hours – enough to power 1.5 million 2-person households for a day.

“The expansion of solar electricity storage systems has picked up speed rapidly. Both the total number of solar batteries installed and their storage capacity have doubled in just one year,” said the lobby group.

“When installing new solar power systems on private buildings, electricity storage systems are now standard. More and more companies are also storing solar power from their roofs to use it around the clock,” said the association’s director, Carsten Körnig. He added that the market for home and commercial storage systems grew by over 150 per cent in 2023.

The industry group lamented that current policies still underestimate the potential of battery storage systems, and that market barriers continue to slow their spread. Against this backdrop, BSW welcomed the economy and climate ministry’s proposals for a storage strategy published in December, but said the draft didn’t address central strategic questions regarding the role of batteries in tomorrow’s electricity system.

Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI) Video : “Going Green – Germany’s Energy Transition”

Storage systems should be considered a central pillar of the electricity system, on par with generation, grid, and consumption, the industry association said.

Storage will become key in the next phase of the energy transition, as Germany aims to cover 80 percent of power demand with renewable sources by 2030. A traditional electricity system doesn’t require much storage because power generation can be adjusted to match demand.

This changes dramatically as the system uses more renewable energy, as power generation from wind turbines and solar PV systems depends on the weather. This means that production often dramatically exceeds demand but also that current power production can fall well short of what is needed at a given moment.

Via Clean Energy Wire

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The siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.

The goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to the Soviet population as “Asians”.

Indeed, the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common practice among European colonial powers. 

The intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:

After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

As one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.

British Movietone Video: “Siege of Leningrad – 1944 | Movietone Moment |

The last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders. The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.

Leningrad, a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union, to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in the Nazi plans.

Sadly, neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101^st Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile. Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.

Human lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop Israel.   

Commemoration of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:

.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

This imbalance in who is visible on television, in the press, and even often in academia is one of the things that makes the South African genocide case against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice so riveting.

Narratives of European history are consumed by the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet menace, and are remarkably inward-looking. From Europe Israel appears as the nation that can do no wrong because it was formed and populated by Holocaust survivors, and it would be churlish for countries like Germany, which committed the Holocaust, and France, Italy and Poland, which were implicated in it, to criticize the state into which they chased those of Europe’s Jews whom they did not simply murder.

Germany thus ranged itself against South Africa, declaring a position in support of Israel and denying that Tel Aviv is committing genocide, despite the daily video available to anyone who wants to see it of the mind-boggling daily Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Germany might seem distant from South Africa, but in fact it was once a neighbor, as I will explain. And its lack of sympathy with the mass murder of non-Europeans is embarrassing it because of its brutal colonial past.

The small southwest African country of Namibia (population 2.3 million) responded sharply to this German claim. You see, the Germans had genocided Namibians, so they are sore about this issue, and seeing Berlin whitewashing the killing of tens of thousands of brown people a little over a century later.

Windhoek’s Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in German last week,

“The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, was extremely angry at the weekend about Germany, which had sided with Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa’s complaint aimed at stopping Israel’s ongoing warfare in the Gaza Strip and also at broaching the question of whether President Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership should be held responsible for a genocide.

Numerous politicians in Namibia reacted angrily and the otherwise reserved First Lady, Monica Geingos, wrote on X: ‘The build up to the Herero-Nama genocide in Namibia, perpetrated by Germany started on 12 January 1904. The absurdity of Germany, on 12 January 2024, rejecting genocide charges against Israel and warning about the “political instrumentalisation of the charge” is not lost on us.’

Geingob had warned in his New Year’s message: ‘No peace-loving person can ignore the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza.’

The Windhoek Observer reported, “Leader of the official opposition party Popular Democratic Movement, McHenry Venaani, echoed the President’s sentiments. Venaani emphasized the inconsistency in Germany’s moral stance, criticising the nation for expressing commitment to the United Nations Genocide Convention while simultaneously supporting what he called the ‘equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.’ . . . ‘We agree with the president’s statement and Germany is misbehaving. They want to turn a blind eye. Israel cannot do a global punishment because they have lost a thousand people, yes we agree and are not disputing that but what they are is against the law. So what Germany is doing is psychological guilt,’ said Venaani.”

Ironically, Belgium, which committed an earlier genocide in the Congo, has taken the side of South Africa in this dispute.

Aljazeera English Video: “Why is Namibia furious at Germany’s ICJ intervention supporting Israel? | Inside Story”

By 1800, Europe had conquered 35% of the world. Despite the fairy tales they told themselves about their benevolence and their spreading of progress, these conquests were brutal. Philip Hoffman has argued that they depended heavily on advancements in gunpowder technology, which tells you everything you need to know about the character of European advances. By 1914 the Europeans ruled 80% of the world. Gunpowder did not become less important, i.e. the pile of dead bodies only got bigger. Of course colonialism was a complicated system that also required getting buy-ins of various sorts from the colonized, but ultimately it involved keeping guns aimed at the locals and being willing to use them.

The Dutch war on Aceh in what is now Indonesia, 1873–1904, involved killing 60,000 locals by military force or exposure and disease. The US in the Philippines killed at least 20,000 directly and some 200,000 – 400,000 died from exposure and disease.

The historians of the colonial powers have written the history, so that the colonial era is often depicted as a civilizational triumph. It is British railways in India or French road building in Senegal that is celebrated. The pile of dead bodies is mentioned in passing, surrounded by embarrassed silence, when it isn’t suppressed entirely. The history of enslavement and forced labor has often been downplayed. In the second half of the twentieth century, sometimes historians of the metropoles have dropped the colonial dimension entirely from the national narrative, obscuring it. François Furet at one point wrote that he would omit mention of Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt since the episode occurred beyond French soil. (I fixed that.) Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism that a lot of Victorian literature is incomprehensible today unless we remember that Britain was an empire at the time and not a small nation-state. Since people in the North Atlantic world don’t much read historians based in the global South, these histories have become invisible.

In 1904, the Herero people rebelled against German colonialism in southwest Africa, and the German government responded in 1904-1908 by committing the twentieth century’s first genocide against them. So writes Hamilton Wende.

Germany was awarded Namibia at the 1884 Berlin conference as part of what historians have characterized as the “scramble for Africa.” Since the Africans were just going about their lives, the “scramble” was by predatory Europeans. Some 5,000 Germans flooded into Namibia and lorded it over a quarter million local Bantus. To this day, whites, including persons of German descent, own 70% of the land there.

After a Herero attack on colonists that killed over 100 in early 1904, the German Schutztruppe or colonial military replied with Maxim machine guns and artillery (Professor Hoffman might note the prominence of gunpowder). Military commander Lothar von Trotha called for the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. As many as 60,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were mowed down just at the beginning of the punitive German campaign.

Germany grudgingly recognized the genocide in 2021, with the foreign minister saying “If you want to call it a genocide, you can.” Germany’s position is that it took place before the 1948 Genocide Convention, however, and so cannot be the basis for any lawsuit or formal reparations. Berlin did pledge $1.4 billion in aid for Namibia, to be paid over 30 years, but without admitting legal liability. At the same time, German officials have often reprimanded Namibians, saying that they cannot compare their experience to the Holocaust, as though extermination of Europeans is forever more significant than the extermination of Africans, millions of whom were killed by Europeans in the 19th century.

Namibians have complained that the sum offered in aid is not enough to compensate for the damage done or for the ancestral lands lost, which people want restored to them. President Geingob says that Namibia is not done with Berlin, and plans a further lawsuit.

So, for a traumatized Namibian population, to have Germany now engage in genocide denial when it comes to Palestinians just brings back the nightmare all over again.

And at the International Court of Justice, Namibia has a voice, even though it still won’t have access to CNN’s air waves or receive much attention in the North Atlantic newspapers of record.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany has generated more than half of the electricity it used this year with renewable energy for the first time, according to preliminary calculations by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW.

“Renewable energies will have covered almost 52 percent of gross electricity consumption in 2023,” the organisations said in a press release. “This means that the share has risen by five percentage points compared to the same period last year and is above the 50 percent mark for the first time for a full year.”

Germany’s renewables share was 46 percent in 2022. Both a decrease of overall electricity consumption and an increase in absolute renewables production – which rose six percent to an all-time high of 267 TWh – pushed up the share of renewable electricity.

Germany aims to have a renewable electricity share of 80 percent by 2030 and a largely decarbonised power supply by 2035. “The figures show that we are on the right track. Many people once thought that renewables would only account for a single-digit share of electricity consumption, but today we use more electricity from renewables than from conventional sources and have our sights firmly set on 100 percent renewables,” said BDEW head Kerstin Andreae, who called for the removal of bureaucratic hurdles that slow down the renewables roll-out.

CGTN Europe: “Sunny times ahead for German solar industry ”

The country’s environment agency UBA also said the targets were challenging. “According to current estimates, renewable electricity generation must increase to around 600 terawatt hours [by 2030] and thus more than double in order to cover the increasing demand for electrification in the heating and transport sectors,” UBA said.

ZSW and BDEW said the share of renewable electricity was particularly high in July (59%), May (57%) and October and November (55% each). In June, electricity generation from photovoltaics reached a new all-time record of 9.8 terawatt-hours (TWh), while electricity generation from onshore wind energy reached a new record of 113.5 TWh for the year as a whole, they added.

Solar and wind energy contributed around 75 percent of Germany’s renewable electricity, with the remainder covered by biomass, hydropower, and a small share of geothermal plants.

Graph shows renewables share in gross power consumption 1990-2023. Graph: CLEW 2023:

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany has added 50 percent more new wind power capacity in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same time period last year, reports news agency dpa in an article published by the Stuttgarter Zeitung. Preliminary figures seen by dpa show that 518 new turbines were constructed between January and September, corresponding to an additional 2.4 gigawatts capacity.

Most of the expansion occurred in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, all northern states, following. However, 316 old turbines were shut down since January, leaving a net increase of 202 installations, with newer ones being much more efficient.

Part of the reason for the uptick is the increased rate of approval for new turbines, the agency reported. The first nine months of this year saw the approval of 976 turbines across the country, equivalent to an capacity increase of 77 percent.

Image by 12019 from Pixabay

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

( Clean Energy Wire) – Renewables covered more than half of Germany’s electricity consumption so far this year, according to calculations by utility association BDEW and the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Wuerttemberg (ZSW). Between January and September, the amount of renewables in the electricity mix rose to around 52 percent – an increase of almost five percentage points compared to the same period last year.

“Between March and September, the share of renewable energies was consistently around 50 percent or more in every single month. The months of May and July were particularly strong, with a renewable share of 57 and 59 percent, respectively,” said BDEW and the ZSW.A decrease in Germany’s total power consumption helped push up the share of renewables, they added.

However, renewable energy generation also rose by almost 4 percent in absolute terms, reaching 199 billion kWh in the first three quarters of the year. In June, electricity generation from photovoltaics reached a new monthly record of 9.8 billion kWh – an increase of more than 16 percent compared to the same month last year.

Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn, German solar facility, on Unsplash

“These figures encourage us to tackle the next milestones. In particular, obstacles to the expansion of wind energy must be removed,” said BDEW head Kerstin Andreae.

She added that Germany urgently needed to install hydrogen-ready gas-fired power plants to guarantee future power supply in times without wind or sunshine.

Germany is aiming for 80 percent renewable power in its electricity mix by 2030, with wind considered the most important source.

The increasing electrification of sectors that so far rely on other energy sources, especially heating and mobility, are likely to boost the total demand for electricity in the next few years while cutting fossil fuel use.

While the rollout of solar power has accelerated recently, the expansion of wind power in Germany remains off-track.

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

Via Clean Energy Wire

( Clean Energy Wire ) – The share of fully electric passenger cars in Germany continues to grow quickly, with the number of e-car registrations growing more than 37 percent in the first seven months of 2023 compared to the same time frame the previous year, figures released by the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) show.

With nearly 269,000 new e-cars on the road, battery-run electric vehicles accounted for 16.4 percent of all new registrations, KBA said. A reduction in support payments for new electric vehicles meant that the share dropped to merely 10 percent in January (after reaching 33 percent in December 2022) before gradually climbing back to 20 percent by July this year.

The share of all new registrations for cars with “alternative propulsion systems,” including batteries, plug-in hybrids, and fuel cell cars, was nearly 46 percent of the 1.64 million new cars registered between January and the end of July — 17.3 percent more than during the same period in the previous year.

The most popular brands for fully electric vehicles were Germany’s largest carmaker Volkswagen, with roughly 41,475 units registered, and U.S. brand Tesla, with about 40,290 cars. Luxury brand Mercedes had some 20,600 new cars registered, followed by Audi (16,785), Hyundai (15,410) and Fiat (11,290).

The electrification of the transport sector is key for the energy transition: switching combustion engine cars for electric vehicles is set to make a big contribution in reducing emissions in the sector, as these have remained stubbornly high for years.

Via Clean Energy Wire

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Clean Energy Wire / Tagesspiegel / RBB

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Berlin’s Senate has adopted a five-billion-euro climate protection fund to flow into mobility, energy efficiency in buildings, power supply and the economy. The goal of the fund, which could be doubled to 10 billion euros by 2026, is to improve climate protection, swiftly end dependency on fossil fuels and cut emissions faster in the German capital, according to Berlin’s governing coalition led by the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).

“We’re still living with a 90-percent dependency on coal, gas and oil,” Manja Schreiner, the city’s CDU environment senator, told German public radio. Schreiner added that Berlin needs a “sustainable, integrated energy supply,” and that the focus will be on solar as well as on “properly promoting” geothermal energy, hydropower and waste heat from data centres as energy sources.

The bill will now go for debate in the state parliament in the hope it will be passed by the end of the year. Tagesspiegel writes that if passed, the fund could end up being challenged in court because of Germany’s constitutional restrictions on government debt.

The country’s constitution does, however, allow for exceptions to the so-called “debt brake” in cases of “natural catastrophe or in extraordinary emergencies.” The CDU-SPD coalition says it sees the impact of climate change in Berlin, aggravated by the energy and cost-of-living crises as well as the Ukraine war, as an “emergency situation.”

The parties had initially mooted the fund during coalition negotiations in March, saying at the time that additional investments were needed to achieve climate neutrality in the buildings, transport and heating sectors.

Still, the CDU-SPD coalition has come under fire for halting new cycle lane projects in the city to save car parking spaces. A citizen-initiated referendum on making Berlin climate neutral by 2030, which failed in March, had also been criticised by the coalition parties.

Via Clean Energy Wire

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( Clean Energy Wire ) – The speed of Germany’s onshore wind power expansion is accelerating, but it is still too slow to put the country on track towards its 2030 capacity targets, the German Wind Energy Federation (BWE) and engineering industry association VDMA have said. In the first half of 2023, 331 wind turbines with a combined capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (GW) were built. The figure represents 65 percent of the total expansion in the previous year.

The total buildout this year is likely to reach between 2.7 GW and 3.2 GW, the industry groups estimate. BWE and VDMA said the government’s efforts in recent months had helped to further the expansion of wind power but was still not enough to reach the target of up to 10 GW annual additions from 2025.

“Missing the onshore wind power expansion targets can have consequences for the progress in other sectors. Heat pumps, electric mobility and green hydrogen can only play a role in reaching the climate targets if onshore wind stays on its expansion path and thus provides sufficient green electricity,” the organisations argued.

The expansion of wind power in Germany was, once again, concentrated on a few states in the northern half of the country, and the average duration for obtaining all construction permits slightly increased to 24.5 months, they added.

The government – as part of its bid to achieve 80 percent renewables in the country’s electricity mix – is aiming for a capacity of 115 GW by 2030, from just under 60 GW in mid-2023. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany will have to build up to five onshore wind turbines per day to meet the target for its most important renewable power source.

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

Via Clean Energy Wire