German hamlet attracts global attention

The tiny east German hamlet of Feldheim lies in the gently rolling countryside of Brandenburg, south-west of Berlin.

But Feldheim is out of step with its idyllic rural surroundings. Viewed from a distance the village of 37 houses resembles a set from the film version of the H G Wells sci-fi novel War of the Worlds.

For around it are 43 giant wind turbines, many of them towering 90m above the ground.

When the wind blows strongly, the residents can hear the whooshing sound of blades cutting the air.

Aesthetically displeasing it might be, but Feldheim, the first community in Germany to meet all its energy needs renewably, is the shape of things to come.

The village has been thrust into the limelight since Chancellor Angela Merkel's policy U-turn last year, when she ended Germany's reliance on atomic power.

The move was a response to public anxiety about nuclear energy that reached fever pitch during the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant last year.

The Merkel Government now wants to shut down all the country's nuclear power plants by 2022 and, by 2020, to have increased its renewable energy output from current levels of around 20 per cent to 35 per cent.

Feldheim has become a mecca for European mayors and town planners keen to develop their own green technologies. And, since Fukushima, it has also pulled in visitors from Japan.

The hamlet has a resident population of only 148 people, but it attracted 3000 visitors last year alone and more than half of them came from Japan.

The hamlet's transformation from a dilapidated rural backwater into a model renewable energy village began in the mid-1990s, when Germany's big energy companies began using the former communist east to carry out a wind-energy expansion programme.

Villagers were reportedly offered incentives ranging from cash donations to new sewerage plants to persuade them to accept turbines on their land. As a result eastern Germany now has one of the highest concentrations of wind farms in the world.

In 1994 Michael Raschermann, a young renewable-energy entrepreneur, looked at Feldheim's exposed location on a plateau and decided it would be an ideal spot to install a wind turbine. Dozens more followed, as the villagers found that they could earn cash by renting their land for use as turbine plots.

Four years ago, with European Union start-up funding, the village followed up with a €1.7 million ($2.7 million) biogas heat plant powered by slurry made from corn and manure. The village also installed a wood chip furnace fuelled from the remains of trees felled in the surrounding forests.

By now Feldheim was already producing all its energy renewably. Its next step was to free itself from the shackles of big power companies such as E.on to whose energy grid the village was linked.

So Feldheim combined with the German renewable energy company Energiequelle to build its own grid, which it completed in 2010.

The project cost each villager €3000, but now they pay 31 per cent less than the standard rate for their electricity and around 10 per cent less for their heating.

The project has also created about 30 jobs.

- Independent