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| Houses in Germany with solar roofs. Image from here. |
Well, it’s
been a busy few days since Christmas, which has seen me in no less than six
different countries. The reason for this was the fact that I had to go over to
England to pick up a large trailer I got cheap on eBay, as well as a bargain
basement 10 year-old-car to pull it.
When I got
to England, on Boxing Day I couldn’t help but notice the whole place looked
like a giant space toddler had spilled a cosmic glass of water over the whole
country. Roads were submerged and trees poked out of what appeared to be lakes
but were in fact fields. I have never seen the country looking so bedraggled
and wet and it is quite amazing to think that only about ten months ago I wrote
a post about the fact that meteorologists were forecasting a drought that
would dry up all the rivers and lead to a devastating loss of wildlife. Well,
they were a bit wrong on that one, with 2012 forecast to be the wettest year on
historical record for England. Welcome to the new normal.
On the way out
of the country a couple of days later, indeed, a flooded road led me to miss my
car-train through the Channel Tunnel and I didn’t arrive in France until fairly
late into the evening. When I did get there, France was entirely dark, so I don’t
have any observations to make about the place, other than that it gets dark
there at night time. Ditto with Belgium, which I entered later in the evening.
I had to
make it to Eindhoven in Holland, where my motel bed awaited me, and did so at
about 11pm. Starving hungry I enquired about getting something to eat (this
particular establishment being located close to the motorway for ease of
parking/locating) and was told that I could either pick from the restaurant or
order sushi in the bar. A quick look at the restaurant confirmed that it was
outside of my price league, so I retired to the bar to nibble on some wallet-emptying
raw fish and sink a fine Belgian beer. Not for the first time in my life I marveled
at the fact the Dutch are the best English speakers in the world; far better,
indeed, than the English.
The next
morning I hit the road again with my frankly gigantic trailer. The rain had
cleared and it was sunny, illuminating the green Dutch landscape and putting me
in a dreamy frame of mind. I had been driving at a steady 80kmph (50mph) all
the way, as this is considered the best speed at which to save fuel – and here
in Holland I noticed a strange thing: everyone else seemed to be doing the same. There were no aggressive light-flashing BMWheads eyeballing me as they screamed
past. I had heard it said that the Dutch had got into eco driving as part of their fossil fuel energy descent plan, and
here was the proof of it.
All that
changed when I got into Germany. I always feel a bit nervous in Germany because
I don’t speak more than about 50 words of German – a language deficiency often
reciprocated by the natives in my experience. It has been a couple of years
since I was last there – but what a difference! It is obvious even to one
passing through that Germany is going hell for leather to make itself run on
renewable energy. Last time I was there you could see all the wind turbines
that had sprouted across the landscape – this time the story was all solar.
I’m used to
seeing the odd house here in Denmark or the UK with a few solar panels on it.
But Germany seems to be ramping up this on an industrial scale. Many houses
sported 10-40 panels, but it was common to see barns, factories and even car
showrooms with roofs made entirely of panels. Usually, as far as I could tell
(remember, I was driving past) there would be 100-200 panels per roof. The
record was one which had eight clusters of 8*8 panels, meaning there must have
been 480 panels on a single roof.
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| A warehouse roof in Germany |
Of course,
and readers of this blog and ones like it will be well aware, that doesn’t make
Germany ‘green’ or sustainable. There are still the monster truck parks, the
giant supermarkets, the sprawling highways full of brand new cars driving at
200kmph (124mph) – and let’s not forget that Germany is a manufacturing country
with a huge demand for high concentration energy and raw materials. I’m also
well aware that Germany benefits from trading electricity with nuclear France,
using that country as a giant battery.
But still.
It’s hard not to admire the direction the country is taking. Everyone seems to
be on board with it, and you’d have to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic to say that
a huge overhaul of the energy system conducted by this nation of engineers is not
a step in the right direction.
