Werner Frohwitter drives his white Prius into Feldheim, parking
halfway down the village's one street in front of what looks like a
shipping container. Behind the street is a field where 43 giant wind
turbines loom over the village's 37 houses. Frohwitter works for
Energiequelle Gmbh, which owns the wind park. He greets a Russian camera
crew and ushers them into the chilly container, which has become
Feldheim's impromptu visitor's center. It's the only sign of life in
this otherwise quiet village. Inside, he uses posters on the wall to
explain the town's energy transformation for the Russian crew's
renewable energy documentary.
This town of 150 inhabitants, tucked away in the Brandenburg
countryside some 60 kilometers (37.2 miles) southwest of Berlin seems
like an unlikely tourist hotspot. It has no bars, museums or
restaurants. But since the Fukushima nuclear disaster one year ago, Feldheim has become a beacon for cities across the world that want to shift their energy mix toward renewables.
Feldheim is the only town in Germany that started its own energy grid and gets all of its electricity and heating through local renewable sources,
primarily wind and biogas. This mix of energy self-sufficiency and
reliance on renewables attracted 3,000 visitors in 2011. Visitors came
from North and South Korea, South America, Canada, Iran, Iraq and
Australia. About half of the visitors are from Japan.
Eri Otsu served as a translator for a group of Japanese energy
analysts and politicians who came to Germany to see Feldheim. "Feldheim
is not a charming Bavarian village; it is gray and they have little,"
says Otsu, an organic farmer in southern Japan. Still, the group found
Feldheim the most impressive of the three German villages they visited
because it is energy independent and uses renewables. "They were amazed
and said they had never seen anything like that," Otsu says.
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| Wind Tower, by mendhak |
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