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

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.

Keywords

• energy transition
• german reunification
• renewable energy
• wind energy
• entrepreneurship