RENEWABLES: Bon Energy

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

BONN, Jun 9 2004 (IPS) - It feels right that a push forward for renewable energy should have come in Bonn, a city trying rather busily to renew itself.

City, well, Bonn is a city only after a fashion. Like the no man’s land that stretched once between East and West Berlin, Bonn occupies no man’s land between town and city.

Its claims to ‘city’ were extended by the inclusion of adjoining towns like Bad Godesberg and the like. As capital of former West Germany, Bonn could not have remained just a town, not in its own eyes anyway.

No man’s land changed after the reunification of Germany in 1991, and how. On that land Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s Manhattan-like projection of skyscrapers rose in expression of a new world and rejection of the old. It seemed to take up new energy, and to give new energy.

That left Bonn, a city of only a little over 300,000 counting Bad Godesberg and all, looking to build a future as a non-capital city. It could hardly have returned to its old claim as the city where Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770. It needed new fuel, if it was not to get fossilised.

Some of it came from the federal government. The government left behind seven ministries even though the ministers moved to Bonn.

Some came from the United Nations, which was persuaded that there can be life outside New York and Geneva. A dozen UN agencies are now based in Bonn, including a few relatively big ones such as the United Nations Volunteers Programme, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the permanent secretariat for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Some compensation for the desertion of Bonn.

More than 150 non-governmental organisations set up office in Bonn. What it lost nationally it sought to substitute with a new networking with cities, people and institutions around the world. It was less national now, but it could be more global. Forget Germany, Bonn now wants to shape the world.

Bonn set itself up as "a pivot of international dialogue," its mayor Baerbel Dieckmann told mayors and officials from dozens of cities invited to the International Conference for Renewable Energy last week. In one way and another, she said, Bonn was a city "transforming itself".

There is something about renewal; when it comes it is in the air, it pervades everything. From renewed energy to renewable energy was not just another short step, it became only another projection of the same energy.

Bonn has figured it needs to put its own house in order before it can speak to the world about clean new ways. In 1995 its carbon dioxide emissions were added up to 2.7 million tonnes, of which close to 900,000 tonnes was caused by private households and three-quarters of that by heating of residential buildings.

The city introduced a system of "fair reimbursement of costs for energy supply from renewable sources", a provision later copied into federal law in 2000. But over this period Bonn built up a generation of 790,000 kilowatts an hour of electricity input into the municipal grid only from photovoltaic installations.

Between May and September all of Bonn’s needs for warm water are met by solar generated heating. That includes several swimming pools now warmer than ever before and so attracting more visitors.

A new housing project in Tannenbusch district of Bonn has been set up as a model for conservation of energy. Over the last 25 years Bonn has cut energy consumption in municipal buildings by 36 percent to 140 gigawatts (one billion watts) per hour/year, and nobody sits shivering in those buildings.

New buildings are using geothermal and solar technology to bring energy costs down to a fifth or even less than they otherwise would have been. Residents in older buildings are also introducing measures to cut wastage of heating.

Bonn is visibly and deliberately a place for buses, trams and bicycles even if there is no quick getaway from cars. Its streets, houses and buildings are trying to give truth to its slogan of ‘local action – global interaction’.

"The wind of change is blowing through Bonn", said billboards that came up during the conference on renewable energies. That wind has been blowing for some time in taking Bonn new ways. A reminder that the ‘developed’ too need some developing.