Original subtitles

I was dreaming of a machine

that would drive over a field, cut the straw

and then produce pellets.

And at some point I had the idea of building my own, mobile pelleting system.

And that's when the story started.

My idea is to produce pellets out of renewable resources and waste materials,

and to generate energy from them.

These waste materials, for example straw pellets,

can provide power and heating, and thus replace coal, oil and gas.

In order to develop such a machine, you need money, and a lot of it.

And I thought maybe Mr. Roughani could get involved.

That we should invest now to preserve our resources over the long term,

in order to even attain some kind of sustainability.

Our world is being shaken by the struggle for an energy transition, for peace, for justice.

It is a fight for the preservation of creation.

It has affected us all for many years now - whether young or poor, safe at home

or fleeing for dear life.

But wealth is distributed extremely unequally.

A billion people are starving every day,

we'll soon have flows of refugees that we can't even imagine right now,

we need to be taking that into account too.

The struggle for energy transition means calling into question the most basic values of our age.

Whoever wants to win it will have to be involved in it every day.

And that renewable energy also generates revenue and financial profits.

But I can't imagine that such small-scale solutions -

a few windmills here, a few solar panels there -

will meet the real energy needs of an industrial nation like Germany.

I just can't imagine that.

A lot of people share your concern. But we have to change something here.

I maintain, as do many other people,

that we'll be using 100% renewable energy by the year 2030...

I don't know. What will we do when the sun isn't shining?

Just send the factory workers home?

The things that are happening right now, all the problems we have, everything,

be it the floods we're having now, the famines, the melting of the glaciers,

everything we experience every day when something in our environment is destroyed,

we can't just not care about that.

I was 24 years old,

and I was attending a seminar by Dr Kleinwächter.

And right at the end, the professor said:

"When you go home now, please think about this:

what will you say to your grandchildren - at some point?

Why did you burn up the environment?

Why did you allow all this to happen?

And I thought about it, and I thought I won't say that to my grandchildren.

POWER TO CHANGE - THE ENERGY REBELLION

A film by Carl-A. Fechner

Having a nice house some day. Having a nice car, a nice life.

Travelling and consuming as much as possible.

I think that's what people get an education for, what they study and work for.

And so, the faith in renewable energy -

I really believed in it as a young graduate.

But the way society was developing seemed so hesitant that at some point I lost my faith in it.

That's why I'll admit I'm also sceptical about projects like Edy Kraus' pelleting system.

I'm an entrepreneur who has founded a technology company, and also runs it.

Our group of companies offers development services and measuring technology for the car industry.

For us, it's very important to identify new trends early on.

That's why I've met up with an expert in change management in Berlin.

...could be opportunities for your company.

Sounds great. But isn't it more of a PR stunt

than a real principle driving your company? At the end of the day,

as a listed company, you have to provide quarterly reports

and not CO2 reductions - the latter won't drive up your share price.

Why shouldn't our solutions also help our clients

to be both more efficient and more ecological? - Yes.

We're experiencing conflicts for limited resources. Every one of us is worried, hears the news.

The only thing many people haven't understood yet is that ultimately the root cause of all these problems

is the increasing need for energy and the competition for these limited, usually still fossil, resources.

Well, if we don't react now, it'll simply be too late.

And I'd love it if someone like you applied their creativity to supporting us.

Kiev, Ukraine

I've taken an interest in issues of war and peace my whole life.

It's probably because I was born in Iran.

And now the war in Ukraine, I'm very preoccupied with that.

This country spends 12 billion dollars a year on gas imports.

And at the same time there's a war going on in Ukraine,

Russia has occupied Crimea and is also involved in the war in Eastern Ukraine.

I also couldn't get my conversation with Prof. Uhl, the SAP Change Manager, out of my head.

I was travelling to Ukraine on business,

and met up with two environmental activists, Anja and Roman,

to find out what Ukranians themselves actually think

about the issue of energy and dependence on Russia.

Wars are caused by numerous factors.

But the struggle for resources is one of the most decisive causes of war.

The coal and nuclear industries were always

a source of funding for totalitarian regimes.

Energy dependence leads to political impotence.

If we stopped buying natural gas from Russia, say, major firms like BASF would immediately go bankrupt.

Chemical company BASF is investing 2 billion euros

into projects with Russian energy company Gazprom,

and is thus expanding gas exploitation in Siberia.

Who is supporting business with fossil fuels?

“The energy transition is the most unsound governmental project of the past few decades.” Michael Naumann, Former Secretary of State

“The big energy companies' profits have massively collapsed due to the energy transition.”

I work with data records about people and companies,

with statistics on macroeconomic relations.

And then I give people advice

about how to improve economic policy.

People who are driven by environmental concerns and just want to push the energy transition,

may not be convinced that economic efficiency is important.

So they set up this regime of subsidies and said:

we'll guarantee a feed-in tariff for 20 years, a fixed price

for every kilowatt-hour of electricity you produce.

It was just launched, without regard for the economic costs.

Thanks to the feed-in tariff,?

almost a third of the electricity produced in Germany

comes from renewable sources.

And yet the Bundestag has decided to abolish it.

I'm a scientist. I'm neutral.

When I saw that a project

that was being pushed in the right direction by politicians is now being halted,

I really felt a duty to say:

no, I want to inform people about what is going on.

If you look at what Germany actually paid...

Without an energy transition, it'll cost us.

Without an energy transition, we'll be paying more and more for oil and gas.

Every year, the German economy

spends around 100 billion euros on fossil fuels.

The development of renewable energies alone has already generated savings of around 12 billion euros,

which is a figure that unfortunately we never hear in the media.

The fight for electricity is a battlefield. There are the lobbyists of the past,

who want to impede the energy transition, who simply make their money burning fossil fuels.

And now renewable energies have come along.

They're getting cheaper and increase the pressure to compete, for certain companies.

Those companies don't want to lose their market power.

Lobbyists try to discredit the energy transition.

They spread myths that it's too expensive, too inefficient, impractical...

These claims aim to hinder the energy transition.

So they can continue to make money using the conventional business model.

Electricity just makes up a third of our entire energy supply.

But what we're currently not considering enough,

is energy in buildings,

and the transport sector. We also need a sustainable mobility. That's all connected.

Electric lorries...

An experimental carrier that has a range of about 50 km.

A gross vehicle weight of 40 tonnes, so probably a payload of around 30.

It looks really futuristic. One-man cabin...

This is really impressive.

Because for short journeys, the electrification of goods transports really can improve our cities.

I'm studying urban planning at Dortmund Technical University.

I also write a blog called 'future mobility',

and advise municipalities

Truck Electrification and companies on transport issues,

Truck Electrification and on future developments.

I've been doing it for over 4 years already,

and I think I've found the right niche.

Blog "future mobility"

How can we organise all this transport all over the world

in a better, more environmentally-friendly, more sustainable way?

Ships are the backbone of global goods transport.

You could introduce Skysails.

This company is trying to use wind power, kites,

the sailing technology.

We could try to power ships entirely without fossil fuels.

I'm imagining a completely new generation of ships.

A mix of kite-pulling systems and fuel cells.

This would already be a huge gain.

The international shipping industry emits

more carbon dioxide than all of Germany.

90% of all transport worldwide is powered by fossil fuels.

Concerning electromobility, actually nuclear energy or coal power

also contribute to electricity production.

So electromobility only makes sense once we are getting all of our energy from renewables.

There'll be no transport transition without an energy transition, and vice versa.

A cargo bike is like a low-tech...

We're in the Institute for Transportation Design in Braunschweig.

People from different disciplines work together here:

Designers, design theoreticians, social scientists,

futurologists, economists, transport scientists and engineers.

They aim to create a sustainable mobility design.

Sustainable mobility means moving away from private ownership.

Younger target groups are actually driving a sharing economy.

They're sharing mobility products, and everyday products.

There'll probably be less products, because they are used by

a community, a neighbourhood etc.

The average power drill is used for about 19 minutes in its whole life.

Completely inefficient.

Cars are immobile for 23 hours a day.

No company would buy a machine which doesn't produce anything for 23 hours a day.

It makes more sense to share these cars,

instead of everyone owning one and maybe even using it as a status symbol.

Defining who you are through 1.5 tonnes of sheet metal

is a bit crazy anyway.

We probably can't completely forego cars, but we will use them very efficiently.

We need vision, and it would be stupid to think that we can let everything go on the way it is.

It took a while,

but I ended up finding an investor.

So we were able to build the first pelleting system,

and I then sold it to Franz Josef Tradt.

It's broken down again!

It's just not performing as it should.

I want to be pelleting, and not constantly trying to fix the thing.

This is impossible!

The machine was tested. The manufacturer said it can produce a tonne on average.

But if I can see now, after just 5 months: the figures that were provided are wrong.

Perfectly normal, dry wheat straw that has been stocked indoors,

runs through at around 600 kilos max.

Has nobody ever checked the figures? There's a meter on it!

The specifications were provided by the manufacturer. It's all data that we of course relied on.

I have to rely on the technology, on the manufacturer.

That's the most important for me. Having the correct data.

Well, at any rate we have a bloody problem now.

I've agreed to client orders for 1,200 tonnes now,

and now I'm going to have to tell my clients I can't fulfil them.

You need to think twice about who you're working with.

I know it's a good concept. I've spent enough time looking into it.

It has to go on, it has to!

It's over... I can't ride a dead horse.

At some point I thought: well, that was a dream, and now it's over.

But it wouldn't let go of me.

I knew, this guy is fighting for his own survival,

and so am I, because I've invested just as much into it.

So we were both in the same boat,

but you might say that I was the culprit and he was the victim.

And that was very, very difficult.

There's one thing that matters to me: if I give my word, then I stick to it.

Anyone who knows me knows that.

My greatest personal goal is

for us to achieve a 100% changeover to renewable energy as fast as possible.

As head of a local energy supplier,

I gain a lot of knowledge. You quickly get to a point

like on a boat, you sail fast in one direction since you notice

no, that direction is wrong.

The Wind's blowing here, so that's where to sail.

However, there's a lot of work ahead.

But we need to deal with it. Together with the community, that's important.

A crucial factor in making the change are local energy suppliers.

Many are already doing their bit:

over 200 municipalities in Germany are already self-sufficient in terms of energy.

Bordesholm is on the way.

In 1991, we were one of the first local energy suppliers to

take over its electrical grid here in Schleswig-Holstein.

And we really had to fight for it.

We faced excessive prices, massive attacks.

So it's... We really lived through a lot of things.

We give grants if a private household installs a solar panel on their roof, or a windmill,

or buys an electric car, of 2000 euros for example.

100 euro grants for e-bikes, energy-saving washing machines, dryers...

We've been providing such support since we took over the grid.

It would be good now if we could find a place for a gas tank.

So we could add a third combined heat and power plant here...

In future, we want to switch over to energy production facilities here in town

and become self-sufficient

with batteries and biogas digesters and a smart grid,

to become as independent as possible.

The huge advantage of having your own grid is

that value creation stays in the region, contracts are awarded in the region.

Newly-installed LEDs save 220,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year here.

We're now able to invest in a modern broadband fibre optic network.

On this basis, we'll set up an intelligent energy network, a smart grid.

That would have been impossible without our own grids.

Looks good... with Internet, telephone and television.

There the fibre optics so in future, we can have

an intelligent management for every household...

Of course, it's always the best, if you save energy.

That's how you save the most resources.

I was long-term unemployed, and now I work as an energy saving helper.

My work is pretty much no-risk.

I know that I'll always find some area where I can save energy.

I never get bad reviews.

50 colleagues are working in Berlin alone on energy-saving checks.

I think that we are already making a big difference.

It's happening all across Germany, and if it was worldwide,

then we would make a huge difference.

- How many people live here? - Two.

Let's find some devices and reduce your electricity consumption.

This fridge is here because

it's simply too big for the size of the household.

We're pretty pragmatic about it.

How can we reduce the storage volume?

Thank you.

Just cooling air is the most expensive thing you can do.

If you have empty compartments, simply fill them with newspaper.

You have a flow rate of around 12 “Hes.

You can buy a flow limiter in any DIY shop.

They cost around 2 euros and have a huge effect.

And if I add all of that up,

you could be saving around 400 euros, that's around 35 euros a month.

Energy-saving lamps, LED lamps...

And I'm sure that if we wanted to,

we could achieve self-sufficiency

through sun, wind and water in the future.

If brilliant minds and people who have a lot of money were to invest a load of money into this,

then it would be possible for us to have an absolutely great environment.

The "great minds", for example banks and insurance companies,

however mainly invested in fossil fuels.

To the tune of over 1000 billion dollars a year.

But a countermovement is appearing: Divestment.

- Mr. Roughani. - Good morning.

Krohn, Alexander. Welcome to Heidelberg.

I continued to think about my encounter with the environmental activists from Ukraine.

Germany is also dependent on oil and gas imports.

I had the idea of investing in energy-efficient construction.

I'll show you. By the way, we're already in Bahnstadt here.

In Heidelberg, energy-saving flats are being built for 12,000 people -

which is also creating 7,000 jobs in the district.

We're building passive houses, over a large area.

This area used to be a goods depot.

Here used to be rail tracks everywhere.

In passive houses, we only need 15 kilowatt-hours per square metre and year of heat energy.

Compared to legal standards for new builds, we're 70, 80% under.

Bahnstadt will thus be the biggest zero emission district in Europe.

If you invest in an efficient house, that's a long-lasting investment.

We hope this will inspire other municipalities:

an energy transition is possible.

An energy transition also means a heating transition. And that begins at home.

In Germany, over half of the energy consumed is used to produce heating.

This heating is still not produced from solar energy. 90% of it comes from nuclear energy, coal, oil and gas.

Solar heat installations warm up water for heating and showering much more efficiently.

They use the sun directly, like here in Berlin-Reinickendorf.

This is part of a general concept that starts with energy consumption.

Housing associations modernise their housing stock's energy systems.

I do energy saving checks

meaning I help the people I visit to reduce their electricity and energy consumption.

But they all say that something has to come from the outside.

We're renovating here, in the Märkisches Viertel.

We have 14,000 flats here and we're completely modernising them from an energy perspective.

So we're insulating the facade here, changing the windows,

insulating the roof, and the cellar ceilings.

And this will ultimately make it the biggest low-energy estate in Germany.

- Enjoy your meal. - Thank you.

And what do the tenants get out of this modernisation?

Sorry.

They use much less energy. They have modern bathrooms.

And they can decide how much heating they need or not.

The tenants thus make energy savings of 50%.

Thanks to the modernisation, their overall rent remains at roughly the same level for years.

Meanwhile, where do the tenants go? Do they just stay in their flats and put up with it?

Even with such extensive works, the tenants stay at home.

But we're usually out after 3 weeks.

So ultimately we created a forward-looking district

that will retain its value in the near and distant future.

It's a big investment, after all. And the reviews show that it's worth it,

in terms both of economics and sustainability.

I saw, in the Märkisches Viertel, energetic modernisation, huge roof areas...

I live out in Hellersdorf. Out on the estate. We also have flat roofs.

Last summer my husband and I came home: what are those huge black sheets?

They'd set up a solar panel system on our roof. All over the whole district.

And so now I get my own solar energy from my own roof, so to say.

So when I make my morning espresso, it's coming from my own roof.

I'm proud that I can be a part of it, without having to build a house.

Just as a tenant in East Berlin.

I didn't have to do a single thing.

In Germany alone, there is a roof area of 1,100 square km that could be used to produce electricity.

Producing electricity and heating. This makes you independent from energy imports.

From Russia, for example.

Shortly after our first meeting, I travelled to Ukraine once more.

Anja had invited me to find out more about this energy dictatorship.

We drove eastwards.

I grew up in Iran in very sheltered circumstances.

But we did experience the Iran-Iraq war.

That killed around a million people.

The war lasted over nine years. And I spent seven of those in Iran.

Those are things that you'll always remember,

and I don't think you every forget them.

Your ID, passports!

The home was bombed in June 2014.

I've been working here for 40 years. 40 years.

Our children's home was beautiful, so cosy, so homely.

I thought I'd be hit by the strike.

They're in Kramatorsk in another children's home.

It's so cold here!

How can you ignore that children and women live here?

It makes no sense.

They should stop, for the children's sake.

There are children dying on both sides.

I personally was confronted with the war in school every day.

We were systematically prepared for the eventuality that we would have to go to the front.

But then my parents made the decision

to send me abroad to my older brother,

who'd already lived in a children's home in Germany.

I couldn't speak a word of German or go to a telephone box.

It's like the end, as if nothing will go on in your life after this.

My brother hadn't told anybody that I was coming.

But of course they took good care of me

and gave us a room together.

Then my life in Germany started. With two small suitcases,

100 deutschmark, in Berlin, in the summer of 87.

I just took everything that happened to me in my stride.

When I found out that he had been at a children's home too,

I liked to caress him.

I'm touched by such children.

In 2015, over a million people fled to Europe

just like Amir did all those years ago.

At the moment, I believe Ukraine is at a crossroads.

Do they choose the Russian way,

and end up keeping their dependence on Russia.

Or do they go the way of the West and create a new dependence.

There are already contracts with Shell,

with ExxonMobil and with Chevron,

about the extraction of shale gas.

And if the Americans and the Europeans themselves extract shale gas here

and feed it into the pipeline,

then Russia will be out of this business.

And strangely it's exactly where these exploration sites are that the war is taking place.

Solar rays simply come down onto the Earth's surface,

and I don't need to go to war to gain access to this resource.

And they're everywhere, just like the wind.

We need to keep weapons away from these areas.

And to use the money differently, to promote economic development.

Ukraine is not alone in having these fossil fuel subsidies.

Global subsidies for renewable energies come to 120 billion US dollars,

those for fossil fuels come to 5300 bill/on US dollars per year.

Governments spend more on environmentally damaging fuels than they do on health care.

For decades we have had wars in the regions that produce crude oil.

The Islamic State has seized several oil fields

and is using the income to recruit mercenaries, weapons and much more.

Our consumption of oil, which we use in our cars and our heating systems,

is financing the very terrorism that threatens us. This has to stop.

In Europe now, renewable energies can only continue to grow

if we stop using the old sources of energy.

But there are major economic interests behind these.

So they're fighting to maintain their business

with coal, oil, natural gas, and also nuclear power.

And they do so using their huge media power.

In 2013, there were posters all over Germany:

"Help, the energy transition is growing unaffordable!"

Mrs. Ternus, who is actually behind all this?

This was an action carried out by the INSM - Initiative for a New Social Market Economy.

It's funded by the Federation of German Industries and the Metal Industry and commercial enterprises.

What does this mean in practice?

The Initiative for a New Social Market Economy influences opinion even at the school level,

by developing and producing work sheets for teachers on specific political issues.

They work with a number of experts,

who if you look closer come out of institutes that are financed by the industry itself,

such as for example the EWI Institute, which is partly financed by E.on and RWE.

People think they're listening to a wide range of different voices.

But it actually turns out to have a very clear bias.

Government - Expert Advisory Board for econmics energy suppliers E.on and RWE - econmics institutes RWI and EWI

And if you endlessly repeat them, pure speculations

or even lies can come to sound like truths.

Oi! and gas companies in the US spend around 400,000 dollars a day on lobbying.

Purely to put a stop to the energy revolution.

Do you have an example of actual lies?

The statement made during the debate on the Renewable Energy Law:

"Subsidies will lead to a huge rise in electricity tariffs."

That's simply not true.

The real reason is a new calculation method and the exceptions made for industry.

Industry saves five billion euros a year

because it pays a reduced EEG contribution.

Mrs. Ternus, 5 billion euros - who is compensating for that?

Well, the consumer.

Thank you for talking to us, what fascinating insights.

Over 2,000 companies benefit from the EEG exceptions.

Thanks to this discount, the Triment aluminium factories, for example, pay 240 billion euros a year less for electricity.

We have to pay money for coal, for the nuclear "bad bank",

and in the most important, forward-looking sector, the energy transition, we just let it happen.

Over the past year, 40,000 employees in the solar industry lost their jobs.

The coal industry still has around 50,000 employees.

But nothing is said about the solar industry.

And that has a lot to do with the influence of the lobbies.

The world is topsy-turvy.

The traditional energy industry is currently under enormous pressure.

This has a lot to do with changes in recent years,

a lot to do with the energy transition that was launched a few years ago.

And all these traditional companies have to seriously rethink their business model.

And people in companies who have been taken by surprise shouldn't be judged too severely for it.

With just one nuclear power plant, big conventional operators make

between 300 and 450 million euros a year.

But nuclear power is by far the most expensive form of energy for the next thousand generations.

What about the nuclear waste? It'll radiate for thousands of years.

Is some future generation just meant to deal with that? It's crazy, what we're doing here!

It has been being dismantled for the past 15 years.

Can we use abandoned nuclear power stations as energy stores?

Here are the facts:

22 nuclear power stations will be dismantled over coming years in Germany.

They'll be leaving behind 100,000 tonnes of radiation-contaminated steel and concrete.

That has to be put into a nuclear waste repository somewhere. No one knows where.

The legacy of a generation of greed.

But that leaves 11 million tonnes of uncontaminated concrete. And that we can use.

We want to build a storage system for renewable energy

on sites where nuclear power stations are being dismantled.

The more solar and wind power stations are connected to the network,

the more storage we need.

To fully reap the benefits of renewable energy,

we need storage for times at which this energy can't be produced:

during the night for solar, or when the windmills can't turn.

What's great is how simple it is. Keep it short and simple.

You dig a hole. Fill it with water.

And you let a heavy cylinder made out of old concrete from the nuclear power station

move up and down in this hole.

When it sinks down, it pushes the water below it

and this water drives a turbine that generates electricity.

And in order to push the cylinder upwards, you have a pump

which pumps water under the piston and slowly lifts it up.

And then it's kept there until you need the energy again.

We can build storage for up to 1,600 MW like this, more than any nuclear power station can provide.

This is just great, because we need storage capacity to be able

to change over from conventional energy as fast as possible, push its use down to zero,

and change over to renewable energy as far as possible. Or actually, to 100% renewables.

Then comes the question: what about when the wind is down? What happens to heating and electricity then?

It's simple: it's only then that we'll switch on the biogas plants.

They'll then produce the heating and electricity we need and can thus provide the necessary adjustment.

But we also need more storage.

So for example it's possible to create a gas that is similar to natural gas

using excess wind energy, it's technically possible.

And this storage technology has huge advantages,

because it also connects the transport sector to wind and solar power production.

Here in Werlte, we've built the biggest power to gas plant in the world.

This is where we use excess power to produce the fuel of the future.

Whenever the windmills are turning and no electricity consumers are available,

we switch on this plant.

Then, first, hydrogen is produced using the excess electricity.

At the same time, biogas from the neighbouring biogas plant is processed to produce raw biogas,

and the CO2 is extracted.

And the hydrogen and CO2 are then methanised, meaning that a new fuel is produced.

It's very important to us to develop fuels that bind CO2,

that use CO2 as a recycling material.

This offers us huge potential to connect heating, mobility and the electricity sector.

We have over 6,000 biogas plants in Germany, we have over 10,000 wastewater treatment plants.

If we use the CO2 from these plants, we could build thousands of these power to gas plants.

It's important for car manufacturers to think about the future too.

But we really need people who have visions and dreams,

and we need people with some power of persuasion.

Think outside the box, think in a revolutionary way,

go beyond the usual limits, but do what you think is right.

And suddenly a complete restructuring, a very decentralised energy system may be possible.

And then it won't be the big firms ruling the game, but rather many small ones helping out.

We simply have to say we want to move away from conventional fuels,

not all of a sudden, but by phasing them out gradually,

just like the plan for the nuclear phaseout, really.

And when renewable energy rises, regulating energy will be provided by battery power plants like in Schwerin.

This is the power plant of the future: a battery power plant. It's quiet. It's very compact.

And it can easily be integrated into a residential area.

We can provide a much better service than what coal and nuclear offer.

We're all used to having 220 volts and 50 Hertz in our plugs.

In order to offer this, conventional power plants compensate for frequency deviation.

This means they constantly have to regulate for the frequency to remain stable.

With this battery, we're replacing the part of the power plant that regulates this frequency,

so we can retire the coal-fired plant.

How many battery power plants would we need in Germany to replace coal and nuclear power plants?

If we take into account what power plants do to stabilise the frequency,

then we'd need to build 100 to 120 of these batteries in Germany

in order to be able to shut down around 6 power plants.

The investment in battery storage - a one-off cost of one billion euros -

would furthermore be significantly cheaper than operating the 6 coal-fired power plants:

1.4 billion euros per year.

Well, here in Bordesholm we'd be very interested in setting up such a plant.

Maybe at some point we'll all have a small battery at home that you can hook up to an intelligent network,

and this will be a service that will be provided by every electricity consumer.

This is how we create big storage capacity: through decentralised storage facilities.

The American entrepreneur Elon Musk wants to produce millions of them at a low cost.

A visionary man and an energy rebel.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk on Battery Storage

Elon Musk is building the biggest battery factory in the world. This could change the world's energy supply.

I think that if we want a more positive take on the future,

we need many more creative people to bring innovative ideas to the market,

to inspire us, to take people with them, in order to achieve this kind of transformation.

It needs to not weigh much to be efficient, and it must be safe.

Because this is a car for urban mobility...

charged with renewable energy and can really change things...

Technology follows a social desire. We start with new forms of technology,

but above all with new forms of social innovation:

sharing economy, car sharing, cycling, flying less, consuming regional products.

There is one high-impact change I can make, as a private individual:

it's air travel and eating meat.

We're projecting that the volume of traffic will triple by 2050.

This is the biggest challenge.

The rising global population, rising consumption, rising mobility.

The more products on the roads, the more vehicles drive around,

the bigger the volume of steel and concrete infrastructure.

25 billion tonnes of concrete are processed across the world every year.

Between 2011 and 2013, China used more concrete than the USA throughout the 20th century.

To make concrete, you need cement. Cement production releases huge quantities of CO2.

Celitement is a cement substitute.

The production of Celitement releases up to 50% less CO2.

But the construction industry insists on using cement.

For the moment.

Other sectors are already much more advanced.

We have completely transitioned to 100% electricity from renewable sources.

This applies worldwide, to all our data processing centres and buildings.

On a global level, data processing centres produce as much CO2

as air travel.

Google clocks up almost 4 billion searches a day.

And every one of them requires energy.

This data processing centre uses considerably less energy than the global average.

Mainly thanks to its intelligent cooling system and radically improved hardware.

By focussing on our emissions and on the business operations connected to them,

be it our fleet of vehicles, our electricity consumption in data processing centres,

heating in our buildings, or telepresence,

we've managed to avoid costs of around 260 million euros over the past 6 years.

And these solutions, which other companies can also use through our software,

have an incredible multiplier effect.

When my son was born with a heart defect,

I also realised

that the time I spend with him is

more important than anything else. And...

And that fundamentally changed my personal attitude to my work, to my performance,

to where I invest my time.

We can all change. But we need to see the point of it.

And we will see this point once we have understood

that it will be personally beneficial to us, and also to society.

This means that we need to increase our awareness of which values really matter in the world.

And often it's the case that we lack the belief or the idea that a process of transformation

can lead to success, and so we avoid change.

We don't want to take any risks.

But in my life, changes have always brought me further.

The big transformation won't come from the top down,

won't be managed by somebody, but from

the bottom up, through numerous small changes.

My client, Mr. Tradt, has found a new pelleting system

that should perform well at last.

So we've tried that out.

- Greetings. - We can start pelleting now.

- Yes, we can. - Good. That's a good thing.

Let's see the barn where the straw is stored.

Franz Josef. Let's get started.

OK, I'll let it run.

Now it's working.

Look at that.

Yes, wow.

Excellent quality now. Hardly any dust.

Great.

Look at this!

Crazy! Crazy, look at that.

It's running at almost 1.1 tonnes now and it's only just got going.

Now we've done it, you've really proved your stamina.

You've really kept going. I have a huge amount of respect for you.

Give me five.

We ended up pelleting 1.2 and 1.3 tonnes in an hour here.

For the first time.

And we were all happy that it worked like that.

We have endless amounts of biomass at our disposal.

Straw alone comes to around 13 million tonnes a year that we can use.

And that's not the end of it. For example, we're thinking about dead leaves.

All municipalities and towns could collect their dead leaves

and then they could be pelleted and immediately used to produce energy.

We're on the right path. The change is happening.

But...

it's too slow. We don't have time. We have to react quicker.

We can't build up any bureaucratic barricades. We should be pulling them down instead!

Hermann Scheer, a brilliant man, and Mr. Fell, they had a pivotal role.

They created the Renewable Energy Law, which has set an example for the whole world.

And now that's being destroyed! And now we're relying on coal.

Who can understand that?

Well of course, many things play a role in negotiations

between people, in particular of course in economic life,

and power is a part of that, so that's exactly what the social market economy tries to prevent,

the power that can be abused to take people on the other side of the market to the cleaners.

Politicians want to shape things. To do that they need a majority. Therefore, they have to convince people.

They're watching it all go wrong. And it will all go wrong.

That's the way it is! So I ask myself: what's happened to intelligence?

The Earth's power supply could be provided by a mix of wind power,

solar power,

biomass,

and other renewable energy sources.

Heating

could be produced mainly from geothermal energy, solar energy and biomass.

We could reduce our energy consumption.

Current fluctuations could be counterbalanced continuously through a combination of storage systems

and decentralised power plants.

How these dual function power plants could be intelligently managed

is already the subject of research today

and this research shows that

this is what the future could look like.

25 of these wind power plants could even

supply the Emden VW factory with electricity.

That's the production of 225,000 cars a year.

Could...

because up until now VW has only purchased four of these wind turbines for its factory.

In 2011 we had the great opportunity of setting up

a larger wind park with up to nine wind turbines on this field.

A real, genuine 100% citizens' wind park.

This would have made us far more than 100% self-sufficient on balance.

And we could have directly and immediately supported kindergartens and schools etc.

Unfortunately the population rejected the plan and in one village we missed the target by 7 votes.

That was a real shock.

Because I absolutely couldn't understand how people could actually reject something as clean as wind power.

We had some very strong supporters.

But there's always the danger... we've experienced this, a handful of people

who distributed flyers with the craziest claims.

They went as far as going to school, intercepting the kids and telling them

to say goodbye to their parents if they voted for wind power, as they'd get cancer.

What do people have in their heads? Now they come and say, oh God,

let's say: moving shadows. Infrared.

Monster turbines. Ice debris. Annoying flashes. Disco effect.

We just wanted to make money.

We shouldn't just think about which arguments to discredit. We must be far more proactive.

We want to create a multifacetted regional energy transition here.

And wind power is just one of our building blocks.

I think we have to take all positions seriously.

OK, we hear them sometimes, we see them too.

But it's worth it to us for the sake of our future.

I mean, we'll never be able to make them invisible and perfectly silent.

You can't generate energy invisibly.

We need wind power. The more we wait to make the energy transition, the more climate change will progress.

And then? Who'll shoulder the costs? Younger generations.

This year, 25 million euros of purchasing power went to external electricity purchases.

If we had a decentralised energy supply,

50% of tax revenue would return to our regions.

Directly to our communities, to the companies that work for the common good. And to our citizens.

As for the environmental consequences...

With brown coal, whole swathes of land vanish for ever. With their cemeteries, their churches, everything.

This simply isn't necessary. It's also not modern.

It's completely archaic.

Because renewable energy is market-ready. We don't need conventional energy anymore.

What we're doing right now, what policies encourage, is:

running a renewable energy system

in parallel with a conventional energy system that must be maintained at all costs.

And we need to move away from that.

In autumn I paid a visit to my first industrial client, Mr. Hans-Georg Hof.

He heats around 6,000 square metres of production halls using straw pellets exclusively.

- You didn't use gas heating at all? - No! We didn't use gas heating.

Our consumption last winter was around 60 tonnes of straw pellets.

And these 60 tonnes are replacing 27,000 litres of fuel oil.

This means that if, in terms of cost, we estimate an average fuel oil price,

we're effectively saving 50%.

For me it was important, with the whole basic idea of doing something like this,

it was very important that you only exploit waste material,

which isn't taking away any valuable surfaces from the food chain.

Even the ash can be used up again as potash fertiliser on the fields.

And I find that very, very positive.

It works. The fuel technology works too.

And now we can start to say goodbye to gas and oil.

The extraction of fossil fuels is becoming ever dirtier and more dangerous.

When natural gas is extracted by fracking, methane is released.

Methane is at least 20 times more damaging for the climate than CO2.

In Canada, tar sands are being exploited across a surface as big as England.

Around 500 million litres of water a day are poisoned in the process.

And that's the fire burning inside of me.

And I'm doing this within the framework of options that I have. I have limited options.

But I'm doing this. And I've always done this. For 40 years.

Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off.

For over 40 years, people all over the world have been combating nuclear power.

On 11/03/2011, an accident destroyed a large part of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

Countless millions of tonnes of waste and earth have been contaminated by radiation.

They are being stored in plastic sacks.

Every day, 600,000 litres of water are contaminated.

They are being provisionally poured into tanks.

In England, there are plans to build a new nuclear power plant, Hinkley Point C.

The state is acting as surety for the construction to the tune of 22 billion euros.

Austria and the green energy providers Greenpeace Energy and EWS Schönau

are suing against the public grants.

Over 180,000 citizens are filing complaints.

In October 2014, the subsidies were approved by the EU.

It stinks to high heaven that this was approved,

and I don't understand why the new EU Commission isn't keeping its distance.

The problem is rather that we're maybe not bold enough in some areas,

meaning that the EU does in fact set itself targets -

where it wants environmental protection and energy transition to be by 2030 -

but it daren't break down these targets bindingly at the level of national member states,

saying OK, you have to do this by then, or we'll be talking about sanctions.

I think we need both, a bold population and a bold government.

I always get so angry when I read that...

The English have a total of nine nuclear power plants, which are all around 30 years old.

And now they have the unique opportunity

to make a new investment into renewables, instead of depending on nuclear power for 60 more years.

Tying themselves to nuclear again.

It's really terrible, what's happening in Fukushima now.

Radioactive water is still flowing into the ocean, people there are overwhelmed by the situation,

no one knows how to isolate the reactor core.

There is no solution to what to do with all the contaminated soil.

Over 120,000 people still haven't been able to return to their homes.

And that shows the scale of this catastrophe.

And Japan has demonstrated, just after the Fukushima meltdown,

how quickly you can reduce your energy consumption from one day to the next.

In order to make the world more just, in order to make the world more peaceful,

in order to combat hunger, in order to put an end to all the social inequality,

we must do more. We're responsible for what we do, but also for what we don't do.

The pioneers of the energy transition were viewed by many as crackpots, as tinkerers.

And that's how I see Edy Kraus, he believed in things

I couldn't imagine it would be possible to realise.

But in hindsight, I must say he was miles ahead.

I think we need these people to open up new paths,

and at the end of the day they are the trailblazers of the energy transition.

The Tautenhain site is a special case for me personally.

Because I know that this site was used to store missiles

loaded with nuclear explosives.

I know that, from this site,

Russian missiles were sold to Iraq,

during the time of the Iran-Iraq War.

And 25 years later,

I'm standing here

and making the opening speech for this park in the missile hall,

where these missiles used to be stored.

And much more than that: my team and I have succeeded

in converting this site, which had ended up in ruins and was an encumbrance for everyone around it,

into a solar power plant, introducing some peace and quiet here.

And that's not all: we're producing electricity for 10,000 people.

I often had people arguing against me, saying that this solar project is just a drop in the ocean.

And that you could just give up on it and still keep a clean conscience.

And I think that was the really important realisation: no, we can't give up on one single project.

It's the sum of all projects that will make the change, create the energy transition

or achieve the goal of 100% supply from renewable energies.

And that's how I think we should view this process. Every one of us

can make a small contribution that doesn't have a huge effect if you look at it in isolation.