From Tinkerers to Consultants: Individual Engagement, Reunification and the Making of Germany’s Renewable Energy Sector

IF 0.3 Q4 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Global Environment Pub Date : 2024-02-26 DOI:10.3828/whpge.63837646622481

Stephen Milder

引用次数: 0

Abstract

The article seeks to explain how and why reunified Germany saw a hundred-fold increase in its installed wind energy capacity during the 1990s. It argues that the development was largely due to private individuals’ practical work to solve local energy supply problems with wind power, and their later efforts to make renewable energy generation a worthwhile investment. The article begins by contrasting the East and West German governments’ understanding of renewables with that of individual advocates. It shows how different renewables looked from the top down than they did from the bottom up. It then shows how renewable advocates’ individual, entrepreneurial approach became accepted across the newly reunified Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1990s, meaning that the ‘wind boom’ of the 1990s went hand-in-hand with the emergence of the renewable energy sector as a business interest. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

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从工匠到顾问：个人参与、统一与德国可再生能源部门的形成

文章试图解释统一后的德国在 20 世纪 90 年代风能装机容量增长百倍的原因。文章认为，这一发展在很大程度上归功于私人利用风能解决当地能源供应问题的实际工作，以及他们后来为使可再生能源发电成为一项值得投资的项目所做的努力。文章首先对比了东西德政府与个人倡导者对可再生能源的理解。文章显示了可再生能源自上而下与自下而上的不同。然后，文章说明了可再生能源倡导者的个人创业方式是如何在 20 世纪 90 年代初被新统一的德意志联邦共和国所接受的，这意味着 20 世纪 90 年代的 "风能热潮 "与可再生能源行业作为一种商业利益的出现是同步进行的。本文采用 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 许可发布：https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Global Environment ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES-

CiteScore

0.50

自引率

25.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The half-yearly journal Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences acts as a forum and echo chamber for ongoing studies on the environment and world history, with special focus on modern and contemporary topics. Our intent is to gather and stimulate scholarship that, despite a diversity of approaches and themes, shares an environmental perspective on world history in its various facets, including economic development, social relations, production government, and international relations. One of the journal’s main commitments is to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to facilitate a common language and a common perspective in the study of history. This commitment is fulfilled by way of peer-reviewed research articles and also by interviews and other special features. Global Environment strives to transcend the western-centric and ‘developist’ bias that has dominated international environmental historiography so far and to favour the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view. It seeks to replace the notion of ‘hierarchy’ with those of ‘relationship’ and ‘exchange’ – between continents, states, regions, cities, central zones and peripheral areas – in studying the construction or destruction of environments and ecosystems.