Book summary courtesy of the Progressive Womens Alliance of West Michigan.

Excerpts from Energy Autonomy: The economic, social and technological case for renewable
energy, by Hermann Scheer, Earthscan, 2005

Introduction Renewable Energy: The Deceptive Global Consensus
p. 8 [T]he practical onset of renewable energy remains confined to just a few nations and regions. 86
percent of wind power facilities installed throughout the world are located in just five countries: Germany,
Denmark, the U.S., Spain and India. 70 percent of photovoltaic facilities installed worldwide are located in
Japan and Germany. In most countries, with the exception of traditionally used biomass and hydroelectric
power plants from dams, the active use of renewable energy has barely gone beyond initial baby steps.

p. 14 Of course, in order to bring about a shift in energy sources, numerous practical hurdles have to be
overcome, impediments that exist alongside the familiar sources of resistance (administrative,
technological, and economic). But the greatest obstacles are mental, inside peoples minds. p. 15 These
mental hurdles result from questionable premises that pervade the discussion on renewable energy and
cannot withstand closer scrutiny. p. 16 The questionable technological and economic premises are:
[insufficient usable potential; the lengthy time requirement; the absolute necessity of large power plants;
conventional energys greater environmental benefits due to increased efficiency; the functional priority
placed on existing energy supply structures; protecting economic resources; the economic burden of
introducing renewable energy]. The six other premises relate to political fields of action and methods:
[renewable energys dependence on subsidies; the need for consensus with the energy business; fixation
on competitiveness in energy markets; the indispensability of global treaty commitments; environmental
pollution caused by renewable energy; the realism of taking small political steps]. p. 19 All these one-
sided premises obstruct our view of renewable energys real potential and of promising approaches to
solving our energy problems.

p. 22 The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created
them. This statement by Albert Einstein also means: they can hardly be solved by the same actors who
brought them about.

Part I Sun or Atom: The Fundamental Conflict of the 21
st
Century
p. 29 There is one forecast of which you can already be sure: someday renewable energy will be the only
way for people to satisfy their energy needs. Because of the physical, ecological and (therefore) social
limits to nuclear and fossil energy use, ultimately nobody will be able to circumvent renewable energy as
the solution, even if it turns out to be everybodys last remaining choice.

p. 34 Once atomic fission was discovered, the prevailing view was that there was an historic path from
using solar energy in pre-industrial times, to utilizing fossil energy created over millions of years inside the
Earth, to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy became the reinsurance policy needed to resume the worlds
intoxication with energy consumption even when claiming, all the while, that the environmental sins of
fossil fuels could be ended some day. Atomic energy also rationalized ignoring renewable energy as
something supposedly backward-looking.

p. 46 Based on a natural potential that vastly exceeds all traditional energy sources in quantitative terms,
on technologies already available today, and with a little willingness to join in some creative practical
thinking, one could plausibly make the case that it is possible to replace traditional energy with renewable
energy [e.g. solar heat, bio-fuels, water power, wave and tidal energy, geothermal energy, wind]

p. 48 The practical attractiveness of renewable energy becomes greater with each step taken towards a
closer and more differentiated consideration of its potential for natural and technological application. This
attractiveness includes: technological and structural enhancements of efficiency through the avoidance of
transmission and transportation costs; the opportunity renewable energy provides for regional and local
energy provision; new building forms that drastically lower active heating costs in houses; and major
opportunities for mining bio-fuels from the biological waste products of the agricultural and timber
industries and from foodstuff production or leftover wood from forestry. Just this spectrum of current
opportunities illuminates how supplying the world with renewable energy, even taking into account
developing countries growing energy needs, is something we can already describe. The proportions in
Book summary courtesy of the Progressive Womens Alliance of West Michigan.
which the individual options are mixed will be different from country to country, region to region, from one
local community to another, and from house to house. Which mixture is realized in each case cannot be
predicted and will depend on many factors. The only sure thing is that todays widespread uniformity in
energy supply structures and energy consumption, which developed on the basis of fossil energy, will
become a thing of the past. Every country, indeed every region will be getting a specific, and also diverse,
energy foundation. Supplying the world with renewable energy will be multicultural.

Part II Blockades to Action: The Unbroken Power of One-Dimensional Thinking
p. 143 Everywhere electricity networks were privatized the role of electricity corporations has been
strengthened, since (after all) they retained ongoing power to prevent any shift to renewable energy (in
spite of losing their regional monopolies).

p. 145 Whoever has the network can assert that there is a need for large power plants in order to
maintain line voltage and frequency. He can also induce artificial supply shortages in order to exact
higher prices for reserve current. Arbitrary blackouts were induced in California between November 2000
and May 2001, [when] the energy corporation ENRON took power plants out of the network on ostensibly
technical grounds in order to derive a justification for its claim that it needed to draw substitute current
from its own subsidiaries at drastically higher prices. Conceivably, it is just a matter of time until one (or
several) of the four electricity corporations in Germany who have the transmission lines under their
control, and who simultaneously operate large power plants, might undertake a major campaign in which
they strike a blow against the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) by staging a blackout in one of
Germanys major supply regions and then blaming it all on wind power plants.

p. 146 A consistently thought-out plan to break up the energy cartels would have to aim at an
entrepreneurial separation of electricity production from fuel delivery. p. 147 It is illusory to expect that
electricity producers would undertake multi-billion dollar investments that would cause them not only to
shut down their own conventional large power plants, but also to end their coal, natural gas and nuclear
fuel transactions in other words, to undertake investments that would run counter to their own best
interests.

p. 154 Think globally, act locally is the motto of numerous strongly committed environmental initiatives.
But in politics another leitmotif has prevailed: act globally, and dont implement nationally until an
international treaty has been concluded. p. 156 It is an illusion to think that a worldwide breakthrough to
renewable energy can be achieved through global negotiations. All attempts to do this have just proved
the point. They even show that global negotiations are more part of the problem than a path towards their
solution. p. 157 Usually at these global conferences, the only thing that happened was the establishment
of networks, new commissions and follow-up conferences. There were conferences about what one
should do, and not about what has to be done immediately and by whom. The result is a self-
referential system, a virtual world that seems to satisfy itself and that confuses its own progress on paper
with real progress.

p. 176 [A]ccording to the worldwide chorus that greeted the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty succeeded in
initiating a common order for making fundamental decisions about energy. The Kyoto Protocol does not
deserve these paeans, and not just because of the minimal obligatory quotas it contains. It contains all
the elements that misdirect, cripple and restrict political and economic action on behalf of a global shift in
energy use, elements that were described in the previous sections: the monomaniacal fixation on a
consensual global solution and on market mechanisms that attempt to compare the incommensurate
and that congeal the structures of traditional energy supply. It is a dubious construct of neoliberal
thinking about energy, whose implementation nevertheless requires a growing bureaucratic effort.

p. 196 The environmental movement has undoubtedly had a major impact. It has sensitized the public to
environmental problems and triggered legislation to match. It has stimulated greater attentiveness to
environmental questions on the part of the scientific community. Businesses and a market for natural
products have emerged from the environmental movement. But the power machinery of the fossil
energy business was never really arrested by these partial successes. p. 197 In the energy sector, the
counter-proposals of the environmental movement were not primarily aimed at the implementation of
Book summary courtesy of the Progressive Womens Alliance of West Michigan.
renewable energy. Instead, their central demand was energy conservation. This only becomes a
problem when this approach to action is played off against renewable energy and even used to
misconstrue its importance.

p. 208 By now the art of modern governance has learned to add the tactic of gently ensnaring NGOs
[non-governmental organizations] to its arsenal of co-optative techniques. If they were still being viewed
as annoying troublemakers in the early years, these NGOs have now become regular team players on
the advisory boards of environmental decision-making. p. 214 There cannot be a successful debate about
the shift to renewable energy if environmentalists adopt an attitude of pleasing everyone and hurting
no one. The new environmental movement needs to be a movement for renewable energy if it is going to
do justice to its holistic aspirations.

Part III Energy Autonomy: The Archimedean Point of the Breakthrough to Renewable Energy
p. 212 Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth. This statement by Archimedes, the brilliant
ancient Greek mathematician, does not refer to some superior mover of the globe. Rather, it is [a] way
of saying that the most important thing about any reorientation is always to recognize where its linchpin is
located. There are many such Archimedean points for renewable energy. By linking energy production
and usage locally or regionally, it is possible to avoid the complex technical, organizational, administrative
and political (including military) costs that both nuclear and fossil energy make unavoidable as they take
their lengthy trip from production to final consumption. p. 233 Renewable energy facilitates an
independent way of life that corresponds best to human needs for individual and social self-determination
and, thereby, to the programme of liberal democratic societies.

p. 233 Modern society is so closely interwoven with the structures of the conventional energy system that
it has become incapable of revolution against that system [T]hat system is incapable of reform with
respect to renewable energy at least if we are serious about introducing renewable energy in more than
a sluggish and fragmentary way. p. 234 The established energy system will only lose its all-
encompassing role for energy supply when there is an autonomous mobilization of renewable energy
from a variety of starting points.

p.239 The strategist looking for a breakthrough to renewable energy should therefore direct her or his
attention toward three points: towards energy availability that is widely dispersed and independent,
instead of concentration on particularly economical international sites, for example, in the Earths sun
belt; towards political decentralization, instead of towards international institutions and market
harmonization; towards stimulating autonomous investments, instead of towards investment planning by
government and the energy business.

p. 268 [I]f society is going to be motivated on behalf of renewable energy, people need to be addressed in
the breadth of their motives [not just economic]. p. 270 Sympathy turns into practical commitment when
people become aware that renewable energy is more than something capable of evoking our sympathy,
when they also see that it should be taken seriously and is capable of completely replacing fossil and
nuclear energy. Renewable energys champions should therefore get to work developing scenarios for
concrete opportunities in the places where they live, in their regions and national governments, showing
the public that (and how) it is possible to meet energy needs with technologies that have already been
tested and are available for exploiting the potential of renewable energy in each specific context.

p. 278 The spectrum of potential winners from a shift in energy goes well beyond the producers of
renewable energy technologies. It also encompasses the vast majority of all other businesses, only a few
of whom have recognized that they have a self-interest of their own in achieving independence from the
energy business [industries for car, electrical and information technology, rail, airline, shipbuilding,
agriculture, construction, and municipal government and regional energy businesses].

p. 297 The champions of renewable energy need to achieve greater clarity about their strategic goals,
and to improve their organizational clout considerably. p. 298 Recent developments in Germany have
shown what autonomy-conscious and autonomy-promoting action for renewable energy can achieve. p.
299 Making renewable energy the foundation for a sustainable future is a priority for the human condition.