RENEWABLES: Same Wind Blowing Through Cities

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

BONN, May 31 2004 (IPS) - Tbilisi in Georgia, Guerrero state in Mexico and Bonn in Germany are beginning to find a common wind sweeping through the cities.

No, they have not all begun to turn wind to power, or power themselves off sunshine, but they have at last begun to move the same way, with some renewed energy.

“We have been making use of wind energy,” Malchaz Shurgulaia, head of the Tbilsi mayor’s office told IPS at the International Conference for Renewable Energies that gets under way in Bonn Tuesday. “It is on a very small scale, but we have passed a new law to promote renewable energy, and we want to learn more here from the experiences of others.”

Like Guerrero state in Mexico. “It is a windswept state,” Amin Zarur Menez, coordinator for municipal development in the state said with some satisfaction. “So in Mexico we are able now to produce 6.7 GWh (gigawatt hours) of power from wind. Still tiny, but who can deny it means that much less dependence on oil and natural gas.

Shurgulaia and Amin have been exchanging city notes with one another, and with representatives of scores of other cities attending the conference in some apparent hurry now to turn fast to renewable sources of energy as alternatives to oil. The oil tank below the soil is still huge, but one day it will empty. Nobody expects the wind to stop blowing.

Bonn seems the right place to meet to talk about this. “We have 160 photo-voltaic (solar energy) plants in this city on buildings and another 411 plants warming water with solar power,” Volker Kregel, executive director for environment in the City of Bonn told IPS.

Four swimming pools are heated with solar power, and there will be more to come after new German legislation, adopted by local government in Bonn earlier, offers support to residents and institutions that turn to renewables.

All that is good advertisement too. Bonn is home also to the company Solar World, the biggest company in Germany producing photo-voltaic solar panels. Bonn is supporting the company to market its products, but is looking also to learn from others, Kregel said.

Like Barcelona in Spain where every new building has been required for some time to draw at least some of its energy from a renewable source. “We are trying to find ways of implementing that here in Bonn,” Kregel said.

But renewables is not necessarily another area for north-north deals and north-south sales. German civil society groups have joined a ‘south- south-north’ agreement to develop renewable energy in Cuba and Nicaragua.

“We have developed very close links with our Nicaraguan partners to develop renewables,” said Osvaldo Romero Romero, professor of energy and environmental studies at Sancti Spiritus in Cuba. “We have taken on specific and very successful projects in use of wind energy and biogas.”

Some of the projects involve Cuba, Nicaragua, Germany and Haiti. Several knowledge sharing meetings have been held, with a view to practical implementation of projects.

“You have seen from the floods how badly we need these,” Max Paul from the University of Jean Price Mars in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince told IPS. “People have been using forest wood as fuel. That has meant that only two percent of the land area remains covered by forests, and this denuding of forests on the hills was a big factor in the flooding.”

Haiti depends on burning of wood for 82 percent of its energy needs, Paul said. “For us use of renewable energy sources now is not just a need, it is an urgent need.”

From one city to another, from Hyderabad in India where daily waste has been turned into a power source that feeds into the national grid, to Daegu in South Korea which dreams of becoming a solar city of sorts, city leaders are gathered in Bonn to exchange notes on practical turning to renewables.

This is not the ministerial part of the conference, but could turn out to be the more important part of it.

“This is the C2C (city to city) initiative,” said Ulrich Nitschke from InWent, a government-funded agency in Germany to promote capacity building in new fields. “International agreements produce nice wording but the local level takes the lead,” he told IPS. “If you cannot convince people about change at the local level, you’ve lost.”

As it turns out most cities have similar problems, he said. Implicit in that is similar solutions. And among the first of these is raising awareness of what practically is possible by way of sustainable development, he said.

Some cities like Bremen in Germany and Pune in India are formally twinned and have running programmes for the promotion of renewable energies. But the new initiative in Bonn has got city leaders crowding together in an exercise that is grouping rather than twinning.

City leaders agreed an eight-point plan Monday to present to ministers at the conference in which they “recognised that a wide-ranging shift towards sustainable energy systems in our cities is urgently required”.

The resolution lists what it wants national governments to do by way of policy changes. And there are signs enough in Bonn now that governments will listen.