These are inarguably booming times for renewable energy across Canada. The Canadian Wind Energy Association is forecasting that 2008 will be a record year for new wind-power installations nationwide. And in just the first five months of the year, the Ontario government approved contracts for new solar-power plants totalling more than 22 megawatts - nearly 90 per cent of what it approved in all of 2007 - under its pacesetting Standard Offer Program.
Yet it's still nowhere near enough and nowhere close to fast enough for Hermann Scheer, probably the most influential renewable-energy lawmaker on the planet. Mr. Scheer, whose most famous piece of legislation catapulted Germany to the front ranks of the green-power business in less than a decade, has called on Canada to make a wholesale switch to 100-per-cent renewables.
Speaking recently to an international audience of bureaucrats and business leaders at the seventh World Wind Energy Conference in Kingston, Ont., the German parliamentarian proposed that Canada adopt a radically decentralized electricity system, powered primarily by wind turbines and hydroelectric plants. The effect, he said, could be the elimination of fossil fuels from electricity generation inside a decade.
Mr. Scheer used Ontario as his case in point, noting that the approximately 20,000 megawatts of its electricity currently drawn from non-renewable coal and nuclear plants was about equal to the amount of generating capacity that smaller and much more crowded Germany had added in wind power alone in the past 10 years. "Where is the problem?" he asked. "The problem is in the mind."
WILDLY UNREALISTIC?
In his Kingston speech, Mr. Scheer anticipated the most obvious criticism of his proposal - that it sounds wildly unrealistic. "We have to come to a general replacement of the conventional energy system in the next three to four decades," he explained.
"That means we have to begin everywhere radically, really radically. And all who say that this would not be realistic have a rotten understanding of realism, because the most important criteria for realism is to have an adequate answer to the real problem."
Changing minds about renewable energy has become the central focus of Hermann Scheer's increasingly influential political career. Although he is little known beyond hard-core green circles on this side of the Atlantic, his position in Europe is roughly equivalent to Al Gore's. His first renewable energy policy, passed in 1998, called on Germany to tile 100,000 roofs in solar panels; his fellow parliamentarians called it "more radical than Greenpeace," but it was implemented within four years and his policy initiatives have since become models for legislators worldwide.
Mr. Scheer argues that only renewable energy can power a clean, emissions-free future, and he dismisses criticisms of it as the self-interested distortions of the conventional energy industry, which will be the only real "loser" in a radically decentralized, renewably powered industry.
He is also critical of the Kyoto Protocol, which, he says, treats climate change only as an economic burden and not as an opportunity.
Mr. Scheer is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (sometimes called the "alternative Nobel") and the chair of numerous international energy and environmental organizations. A former economics professor and later a systems analyst at the German Nuclear Research Centre, he was first elected to parliament in 1980, representing the left-leaning Social Democrats. He was a key member of the "Red-Green" coalition that governed Germany from 1998 to 2007 and the architect of Europe's most ambitious renewable energy policy, a "feed-in tariff" that has vaulted Germany into the global lead in wind- and solar-power production and put the country on course to draw 30 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
