One of the world’s clean energy heroes, the German Herrmann Scheer, has died of a torn aorta in Berlin, aged 66.
The Social Democrat member of parliament played a large part in writing Germany’s green energy promotion legislation, which has made the country a world leader in the field and has been copied by dozens of countries.
Once called by Time magazine a ‘Hero for the Green Century,’ Scheer wrote several books on renewable energy, including A Solar Manifesto and The Solar Economy. He made a film, The Fourth Revolution – Energy Autonomy.
Scheer promoted solar energy worldwide, arguing that the current pattern of energy usage would ultimately be environmentally damaging, and that renewable energy is the only realistic alternative.
Comments
Re: Clean energy hero dies
German solar panel subsidies are only paid if you feed all the energy from your solar panels into the grid. If you power your house from the solar panels, and only feed an eventual surplus energy production into the grid, you receive no subsidy at all. As a result renewables subsidies are in fact pumped power station subsidies, either wasting local mountains, or jamming the grid with connections to outsourced pumped power. It should be exactly the other way round, with local circuits being developed in a way that allows the grid to be sustainably shrunk.