Additional Reading
Renewable energy in Germany
The share of electricity produced fromrenewable energy in Germanyhas increased from 6. 3 percent of the national total in 2000 to over 20 percent in the first half of 2011. In 2010, investments totaling 26 billion Euros were made in Germany’s renewable energies sector.
According to official figures, some 370,000 people in Germany were employed in the renewable energy sector in 2010, especially in small and medium sized companies. This is an increase of around 8 percent compared to 2009 (around 339,500 jobs), and well over twice the number of jobs in 2004 (160,500). About two-thirds of these jobs are attributed to the Renewable Energy Sources Act. Germany is the world's first major renewable energy economy. In 2010 nearly 17 % (more than 100 kW h– kilowatt hour) of Germany's electricity supply (603 kW h) was produced from renewable energysources, more than the 2010 contribution of gas fired power plants.
Renewable electricity in 2010 was 101.7 kW h includingwind power36.5 kW h,biomassandbiowaste33.5 kW h, hydropower 19.7 kW h and photovoltage solar power12.0 kW h.
Germany's renewable energy sector is among the most innovative and successful worldwide (fig1). Nordex,Repower, Fuhrländer and Enercon are wind power companies based in Germany. SolarWorld,Q-Cells and Conergy are solar power companies based in Germany. These companies dominate the world market. Every third solar panel and every second wind rotor is made in Germany, and German turbines and generators used in hydro energy generation are among the most popular worldwide.
Fig. 1. Renewable electric power produced
in Germany in 2009 (by energy source)
Nearly 800,000 people work in the German environment technology sector; an estimated 214,000 people work with renewables in Germany, up from 157,000 in 2004, an increase of 36 percent.
Siemenschief executive, Peter Löscher believes that Germany’s target of generating 35 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020 is achievable – and, most probably, profitable for Europe’s largest engineering company. Its “environmental solutions” portfolio, which is firmly focused on renewables, is “already generating more than € 27 billion a year, 35 per cent of Siemens’ total revenue, and the plan is to grow this to € 40 billion by 2015”. Ending its involvement in nuclear industry will boost the credibility of Siemens as a purveyor of “green technology”.
Germany's main competitors in solar electricity are Japan, the US and China. In the wind industry it is Denmark, Spain and the US.
Renewable energy targets in Germany
Since the passage of theDirective on Electricity Production from Renewable Energy Sourcesin 1997, Germany and the other states of the European Unionhave been working towards a target of 12 %renewable electricityby 2010. Germany passed this target early in 2007 when the renewable energy share in electricity consumption in Germany reached 14 %. In September 2010 the German government announced the following new aggressive energy targets:
§ Renewableelectricity– 35 % by 2020 and 80 % by 2050.
§ Renewableenergy– 18 % by 2020, 30 % by 2030, and 60 % by 2050.
§ Energy efficiency– cutting the national electrical consumption 50 % below 2008 levels by 2050.
The German Government reports that in 2010renewable energy (mainly wind turbines and biomass plants) generated more than 100 kW h (billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity, providing nearly 17 % of the 600 kW h of electricity supplied.
Wind power
Closely after the USA, Germany is the world's second largest user ofwind powerwith an installed capacity of 23,903 MW by the end of 2008, ahead of Spain which had an installed capacity of 16,740 MW (megawatt). 20,301wind turbinesare located in the German federal area and the country has plans to build more wind turbines.
In 2009, 6.5 % of Germany's total electricity consumption was satisfied by wind power. 867 wind power plants were constructed in 2008, and 952 more in 2009. At the end of 2009, Germany possessed 21,614 wind power plants. Their installed electricity production capacity was 25,777 MW.
Wind power currently produces about seven percent of Germany's total power and it is said that no other country has more technological know-how in this area. Wind power in Germany provides over 70,000 people with jobs and German wind energy systems are also exported. However, the economics of wind power in Germany are under close scrutiny and there are other issues which deserve consideration. These include the effects of wind turbines on the landscape, the bird population, and the tourist industry.
Following the2011 Japanese nuclear accidents, Germany's federal government is working on a new plan for increasingenergy efficiencyandrenewable energy commercialization, with a particular focus onoffshore wind farms. Under the plan largewind turbineswill be erected far away from the coastlines, where the wind blows more consistently than it does on land, and where the enormous turbines won't bother the inhabitants. The plan aims to decrease Germany's dependence on energy derived from coal and nuclear power plants.
Photovoltaic solar power
At the end of 2007 Germany had an installed capacity of 3,830 MWp(megawatts-peak). By the end of 2009, capacity had increased to 9,800 MWp. The first 9 months of 2010 added about 5,400 MWp in new solar capacity. In 2006, theEuropean Commissionanticipated that Germany may have installed around 4,500 MWp by 2010. For 2009, the German government calculated that the PV industry provided 64,700 jobs in production, distribution and installation. Over 90 % of solar PV installations are in grid-tied applications in Germany.
Completed in 2006, the 12 MWSolarpark Gut Erlaseephotovoltaic system, nearArnsteininBavaria, was, at the time of construction, the world's largest PV system. TheWaldpolenz Solar Park, which is the world’s largestthin-film photovoltaic(PV) power system, became fully operational by the end of 2008. The power plant is a 40 MWsolar powersystem using state-of-the-artthin filmtechnology.
Geothermal power
The installed capacity for geothermal energy in Germany was of 8.4 MW in 2007. The total installed capacity of Hydroelectricity in Germany at the end of 2006 was 4.7 GW. Hydropower meets 3.5 % of the electricity demand. Latest estimates show that in Germany in 2007 approx. 9,400 people were employed in the hydropower sector which generated a total turnover of €1.23 billion.
The Internet
The Internet, a global computer network which embraces millions of users all over the world, began in the United States in 1969 as a military experiment. It was designed to survive a nuclear war. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another. Because of this, any two computers on the Internet will be able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packet swithing. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out (by a nuclear explosion, for example), information will just route around them. One such packet-swithing network already survived a war. It was the Iraqi computer network which was not knocked out during the Gulf War.
Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50 %) are in the United States, while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet,
There are millions, and their number is growing by thousands each month worldwide.
The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet: reading USENET News, using the World-Wide Web, telnet, FTP, and Gopher.
In many developing countries the Internet may provide businessmen with a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunications systems of these countries. Commercial users can communicate over the Internet with the rest of the world and can do it very cheaply. When they send e-mail messages, they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not for calls across their countries or around the world. But who actually pays for sending e-mail messages over the Internet long distances, around the world? The answer is very simple: a user pays his/her service provider a monthly or hourly fee. Part of this fee goes towards its costs to connect to a larger service provider. And part of the fee got by the larger provider goes to cover its cost of running a worldwide network of wires and wireless stations.
But saving money is only the first step. If people see that they can make money from the Internet, commercial use of this network will drastically increase. For example, some western architecture companies and garment centers already transmit their basic designs and concepts over the Internet into China, where they are reworked and refined by skilled – but inexpensive – Chinese computer-aided-design specialists.
However, some problems remain. The most important is security. When you send an e-mail message to somebody, this message can travel through many different networks and computers. The data are constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. Because of this, it is possible to get into any of computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. In spite of the fact that there are many strong encoding programs available, nearly all the information being sent over the Internet is transmitted without any form of encoding, i. e. “in the clear”. But when it becomes necessary to send important information over the network, these encoding programs may be useful. Some American banks and companies even conduct transactions over the Internet. However, there are still both commercial and technical problems which will take time to be resolved.
Anelectronic book
Anelectronic book(e-book, digital book) is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printedbook, e-books can also be born digital. TheOxford Dictionary of Englishdefines the e-book as “an electronic version of a printed book,” but e-books can and do exist without any printed equivalent. E-books are usually read on dedicatede-book readers. Personal computers and somemobile phonescan also be used to read e-books.
In 1971,Michael S. Hartwas given extensive computer time by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at theUniversity of Illinois. Seeking a worthy use of this resource, he created the first e-book by typing theUnited States Declaration of Independenceinto a computer. Project Gutenbergwas launched afterwards to create electronic copies of more books.
One early e-book implementation was the desktop prototype for a proposed notebook computer, theDynabook,in the 1970s atPARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated): a general-purpose portable personal computer capable of displaying books for reading.
Early e-books were generally written for specialty areas and a limited audience, meant to be read only by small and devoted interest groups. The scope of the subject matter of these e-books included technical manuals for hardware, manufacturing techniques and other subjects. In the 1990s, the general availability of theInternetmade transferring electronic files much easier, including e-books.
Numerous e-book formats, viewcomparison of e-book formats, emerged and proliferated, some supported by major software companies such asAdobewith itsPDFformat, and others supported by independent and open-source programmers. Multiple readers followed multiple formats, most of them specializing in only one format, and thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. Due to exclusiveness and limited readerships of e-books, the fractured market of independents and specialty authors lacked consensus regarding a standard for packaging and selling e-books. In 2010 e-books continued to gain in their own underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in thepublic domain. At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by publishers offered their works online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial (and occasionally unauthorized) catalogs of books became available over the web, and sites devoted to e-books began disseminating information about e-books to the public.
U. S. Libraries began providing free e-books to the public in 1998 through their web sites and associated services, although the e-books were primarily scholarly, technical or professional in nature, and could not be downloaded. In 2003, libraries began offering free downloadable popular fiction and non-fiction e-books to the public, launching an e-book lending model that worked much more successfully for public libraries. The number of library e-book distributors and lending models continued to increase over the next few years. In 2010, a Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study found that 66 % of public libraries in the U. S. were offering e-books, and a large movement in the library industry began seriously examining the issues related to lending e-books, acknowledging a tipping point of broad e-book usage. However, some publishers and authors have not endorsed the concept ofelectronic publishing, citing issues with demand, piracy and proprietary devices. Demand-driven acquisition (DDA) has been around for a few years in public libraries, which allows vendors to streamline the acquisition process by offering to match a library’s selection profile to the vendor’s e-book titles. The library’s catalog is then populated with records for all the e-books that match the profile. The decision to purchase the title is left to the patrons, although the library can set purchasing conditions such as a maximum price and purchasing caps so that the dedicated funds are spent according to the library’s budget.
As of 2009, new marketing models for e-books were being developed and dedicated reading hardware was produced. E-books (as opposed to e-book readers) have yet to achieve global distribution. In the United States, as of September 2009, theAmazonKindlemodel andSony'sPRS-500 were the dominant e-reading devices. By March 2010, some reported that the Barnes & Noble Nookmay be selling more units than the Kindle.
On January 27, 2010Apple Inc. launched a multi-function device called theiPad and announced agreements with five of the six largest publishers that would allow Apple to distribute e-books. The iPad includes a built-in app for e-books callediBooksand theiBooks Store.
In July 2010, online booksellerAmazon. comreported sales of e-books for its proprietaryKindleoutnumbered sales ofhardcover booksfor the first time ever during the secondquarterof 2010, saying it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was nodigital edition. By January 2011, e-book sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales. In the overall U. S. market, paperback book sales are still much larger than either hardcover or e-book; the American Publishing Association estimated e-books represented 8.5 % of sales as of mid-2010, up from 3 % a year before.