Ursula Sladek, a 2011 Goldman Environmental Prize recipient, is the co-founder and president of EWS, one of Europe’s largest cooperatively owned green energy companies. Motivated by the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl in 1986, the schoolteacher and mother of five from the small town of Schönau (population 2,382) in Germany’s Black Forest region — along with her husband Michael and a group of concerned parents — unsuccessfully lobbied her regional power company to adopt conservation measures, to no avail. After over 10 years of citizen activism and two referendums, Sladek and her small-town energy rebels were able to take over the local grid and start a community-run power co-op.
With total sales reaching 67 million euro in 2009, EWS has long outgrown its local market. While Schönau boasts three times the national average in photovoltaics, 20 cogeneration units, two hydroelectric plants, and a windmill, EWS today provides power from over 1,800 solar, hydroelectric, wind, biomass and cogeneration facilities to 115,000 homes and businesses throughout Germany and Europe. With the Merkel government’s recent decision to phase out nuclear energy by 2022 and a targeted switch to 100 percent renewables by 2050, the former rebels suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a new energy era.
Ursula Sladek: Until Chernobyl neither my husband nor I had been politically or environmentally engaged at all. We were just ordinary people raising our children and pursuing our careers. In my case, of course, my career was raising children. You know, five little kids, that’s quite a job, you don’t need to do much else.
Then Chernobyl happened, and it was just like a bomb had been dropped into our lives. My husband immediately realized the scale of it. Being a physician, he had obviously had more experience with radiation in its various applications than me. I remember thinking at first, “Oh my, those poor people over there,” but I didn’t think it would affect us.
Soon after, of course, it became clear how small the world is and how this was affecting us as well. All of a sudden we were wondering, “Should we let the kids play in the sandbox?” and, “What’s okay for them to eat?” The federal government at the time said that perhaps it would be best to feed your children powdered milk instead of fresh milk. They said, “Don’t eat salad, don’t eat spinach.” It was the same message you’re hearing again right now from Japan.
My husband was a member of our church council at the time, and I said to him, “Michael, this is also the church’s concern, because we’re dealing with God’s creation here, we can’t just destroy it like that. The churches have to get involved in this, too.” So we brought this to the church council, we wrote the bishop and got nice responses, but nothing happened.
Nothing happened on a federal level — in fact, nothing really happened anywhere that would indicate a change in thinking. And that’s when we realized, “Okay, we have to step up here, we the people have to bring about change on our own.”
we got together with a group of people that didn’t necessarily know each other before. One of them had put an ad in the paper a few weeks after Chernobyl that said if you’re concerned about what’s happening and feel like you need to do something about it, to please get in touch with him. So I did, and that’s how a small group formed.
Like so many other groups, we first called ourselves “Parents Against Nuclear Power,” but we changed that relatively soon, because one of our members said that he didn’t like being “against” something, he wanted to be “for” something. So we called ourselves “Parents for a Nuclear-Free Future,” which of course physically speaking is impossible, but everyone knows what it means.
We went to KWR,the regional power company that ran the Schönau grid at the time, when we were first starting out with our energy saving activities and we asked them whether they’d like to join, and wouldn’t it be nice to do this together? We told them we didn’t want a lot from them, perhaps a few old electric meters we could loan out to some customers, and they said: “Conserve energy? Have you lost your mind? We want to sell energy, not save it! Actually, you are bad for business, you should be glad we’re not coming after you.”
We walked home completely deflated, thinking, what on earth is going on here?
When the issue was first discussed in 1990, we weren’t even talking about challenging their license, we just wanted to have some regulations. For example, energy-saving tariffs, meaning rates based on consumption, with low or no basic rates, and a more sensible treatment of cogeneration units. Things like that.
KWR had put out a bait, guaranteeing the city an additional concession of 100,000 Deutschmarks (50,000 euro) to extend their license early. These licenses usually run for 20 years, and they wanted to extend it for four years before it expired, because they knew something was brewing in Schönau. Our city council person went back to KWR and presented our suggestions, and they thought he was kidding. They said, “look, this is a model contract, all communities get the same one, we’re not going to change a thing, no comma, no period, nothing. You either sign this and get your 100.000 DM, or you don’t sign it, we’ll keep our 100,000 DM and you’ll be signing it anyway in four years and get nothing because we’re the only electricity game in town.”
So we sat together, drank a bunch of red wine, and made a plan. The plan had two parts, because it was clear that the town wanted to have the 100,000 DM while also wanting to have some of these environmental provisions written into the license. So we said, it’s very simple, the town is going to get the money from us. We’ll just ask 250 people to donate 100 DM for each of the next four years, and that’ll take care of it. And it was really extremely easy. We found 250 people within six weeks, because they said: “100 marks per year, that’s very cheap entertainment.”
The second half of the plan was to build a people-owned power company, so we could put in our own bid for the new license once the old one expired. We were still naive, because we went to the mayor’s office thinking he’d be really happy about our great plan. And the mayor thought we had all gone crazy. How on earth are these citizens going to supply this town with energy? Running an energy company is complicated, you must surely have done this for a hundred years to be able to do this, right? However, at this point we had already garnered a lot of media interest, because, of course, it was a great story: Residents of a small community give their town 100,000 DM to not sign a contract!
Reluctantly the mayor agreed to let us conduct a feasibility study to show how we were going to do this, and we did. At this point we had already consulted with a lot of energy experts all over Germany. We conducted the study, learned a lot while doing it, and then proudly presented it to the mayor, who gave it to the local examiners office. And they said, “Dear mayor, you should accept your citizens’ offer. What they’ve done here is great and you really can’t lose. You get your 100,000 DM and choose between two providers.”
However, they still didn’t want to do it, and there was a town council decision against us. In Germany there’s the possibility of having a referendum against a town council decision, and that’s what we did.
when we learned a lot about political work and with it lost a little bit of our naiveté, even though we still approached a lot of other things very naively. Of course, you have to consider the risks in things, but if you always just play it safe right from the beginning, you’re never going to get anywhere, because that’s when your mother’s voice appears in your head and says, “you can’t do that. It’s much too expensive. Be careful, it’s too dangerous.” So you have to pretend as if you have already overcome all obstacles and forget everything you’ve been taught.
the first referendum was still much more benign, also because KWR didn’t really take us seriously. They thought, gee, these crazy people, nobody is going to vote for their nonsense, everyone can see that they’re totally deluded. So they approached the whole thing rather casually, whereas in the run-up to the second referendum they knew what was at stake and that now it was do or die. So obviously they upped the ante quite a bit. The second referendum was really really tough. That was a time of my life I’d rather not relive, to be honest. The worst part about it were all the personal attacks, and what’s really difficult is not to lash out in the same way.
there was the issue about the cost of the grid. We had calculated it at 4 million DM, and that was actually quite generous, because we didn’t want it to look like we were trying to make a profit from this. We knew 4 million was the upper limit, and KWR demanded 8.7 million. It was clear that we wouldn’t be able to do this through donations, and so they tried to kill our whole project that way. If you want to be an energy provider you have to have a permit from the department of finance, and you have to make your case to them that you can maintain uninterrupted service and do it cheaply. And cheaply in this case means it can’t cost more than under the previous provider. If we’d had to pay 8.7 million DM there would have been no way for us to do this economically. We would have had to double the prices, so it was obvious that this was their leverage to prevent it all from happening.
So then we had to think about what to do next. KWR said to us, “Why don’t you sue us?”, but we knew that suing them would be a long, drawn out affair. Another community had just had a 17-year trial with their energy provider, and we said, “no, we’re not going to do that.” As we were thinking about other ways to go about this, we had this idea: what if we pay them everything, and then take our time suing them afterwards? That was feasible, because especially in the area of monopolies these are legitimate options. Normally, you can’t do that, you can’t just buy someone’s house and then sue him afterwards, but because I don’t have a choice when someone has a monopoly and I have to buy this one thing, that’s why this option was available.
we got it back, in 2005. It turned out that the grid was worth only 3.5 million DM, so not even the 4.3 million we had calculated, and they had to pay us back everything we overpaid, with interest.
the Störfall campaign was all about. It was such an amazing experience, I can’t really describe it in words. It started with us sending letters to the 50 largest ad agencies in Germany, asking if they would be interested in coming up with a campaign for us. It had to be fully professional, we’re talking about collecting millions of DM in donations, that’s no small change. The last sentence in our query was, “it has to be pro bono, because we have no money.”
I have to admit, I really didn’t think anyone was going to respond, but 16 of them did, saying what a great thing we had going, and they’d love to help. After evaluating the agencies we picked one, and they came up with “Ich bin ein Störfall” [“I’m a nuisance.”]. It was quite provocative, all of a sudden people are becoming a nuisance for the nuclear industry.
From entrepreneurs who sent us 200,000 DM to school children who donated their pocket money, it was a great success. Old folks who asked for money in lieu of birthday presents to support the Schönauers. Ever since then I’ve believed that anything is possible.
I think this could have been done anywhere. Schönau is really just a very ordinary town. We have a conservative majority. When you look at election results, this is not exactly a Green or progressive stronghold, but a normal mix, if anything more conservative than the national average. I find it incredible what the citizens of Schönau did in those referendums, that was quite something, but I still think it would have been possible anywhere else.
I really believe in the possibility of change if a few people get together with a common cause. And then others will just join in. I see this all over now, just last Monday I was in a town where a cooperative has formed to take over the grid. They want to finance new renewable energy providers in their town. Last night we were in another town 100km down the road and they want to do the same. So there’s a lot of activity everywhere.
Everyone has to realize that we all have to contribute. Everyone can conserve energy, and everyone can invest their money in the right places. And citizens are going to have to accept some more unpopular measures, like the construction of new power lines. Of course, nobody is happy about that. I wouldn’t like it either if a power line was built right above my house — it’s not healthy and my house will lose value, that’s understandable. At the same time this encourages a new culture of democracy, and I’m excited about people in Germany having to be involved in these decisions from a much earlier point.
– source alternet.org