Jobs and prosperity through renewable energies
IRENA, the global voice for renewable energies based in Abu Dhabi, expects renewable energies to create more than 40 million jobs worldwide by mid-century.
Over the past 25 years, around 12 million new jobs have been created by renewables. China is in first place with 7.4 million jobs, followed by the EU, Brazil, the USA and India. The fastest growing renewable energy jobs are in the expansion of photovoltaics. Within the EU, 826,000 new jobs were created in the solar energy sector alone by 2023, an increase of 22 percent over the previous year (IRENA “Highest Annual Growth of Renewables Jobs in 2023, Reaching 16.2 Million”)
No vision, no future!
If the citizens of the old GDR had been without visions, the East Germans would still be living in a dictatorship today. If the arch-conservative US President Ronald Reagan had had no visions, he would not have been able to proclaim the visionary sentence at the Brandenburg Gate in the mid-1980s: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Berlin Wall.” Reagan was ridiculed like all visionaries. But he was right.
Today’s visions have always been tomorrow’s realities. But in Germany, we have too little vision. Nuclear-fossil energy supply was yesterday – solar age is tomorrow. Some parties still have not understood this and are still propagating a “back” to the old technologies in the current election campaign.
But solar visions are a force that is stronger than all the power and money and all the propaganda of the nuclear, coal, gas and oil lobby combined. It is the power of enlightened citizens, the power of reason and the power of the people. More and more people see through the tricks, manipulation, false reports and the financial rip-off of the old energy lobby. The increasing natural disasters and the ever-increasing prices of the old energy sources – due to scarcity and ever-higher CO2 prices – are our best learning aids.
The complete solar energy transition still seems impossible to many people today because they either don’t want to or can’t imagine it. We must first learn to imagine what we are doing if we simply continue as before. We have long known what we are doing with our old energy policy, but we are not yet doing what we know or at least could know. Some – such as the nationalist AfD in Germany or parts of the Free Democrats and parts of the CDU/CSU – don’t even want to know. Yet the technologies for the transition and transformation have long been tried and tested thousands of times worldwide.
Overall, the results of many surveys show that pioneers and thought leaders in business are succeeding in meeting the challenges of climate change and its consequences while also being successful. All companies have the opportunity to not only protect the environment by acting sustainably, but also to remain competitive in the long term and to position themselves more resiliently overall, according to the study „Klimarisiken und Folgeschäden des Klimawandels 2023 – Potenziale der deutschen Industrie im Hinblick auf Innovationen und Portfolioanpassungen“.
The speed with which a complete transition to renewable energies is possible is shown in the energy report by environmental activist Raimund Kamm, who compares Germany’s electricity production in the first two half-years of 2023 and 2024: Energy balances for the first and second quarters of 2024, as well as data from the Fachagentur Wind- und Solarenergie e. V. – Success figures of the energy transition.
Changes from HY24 to HY23
- Nuclear power: – 100%
- Solar power: + 13%
- Wind power: + 10%
- Coal-fired power: – 26%
- Electricity exchange price: – 33%
- Wholesale gas price: – 33%
My suggestion: Please consider where this development could take us in just ten years. It is the peaceful path to a global solar revolution and the dawn of a new era for humanity. For this to succeed, it is crucial that a large industrialized nation with high energy consumption leads the way. Pakistan is not an industrialized nation, but the country has increased its solar power share twenty-eightfold in the last two years. This is mainly because renewable energies are incredibly inexpensive.
We no longer have any knowledge gaps, but even in this country of doubters – for example, of wind energy – we only have implementation problems. For example, an acquaintance of mine had to fight in court for 15 years to be allowed to reactivate an old water wheel on his own property. It is pure bureaucratic and legal madness that approval procedures for wind turbines take up to ten years. The German protection of historical monuments should – in order to preserve monuments – above all protect the climate, but it often prevents what it allegedly wants to protect. Climate protection is the prerequisite for truly long-term and sustainable protection of historical monuments.
In southern, sunny countries, we can already produce solar power for less than one euro cent per kilowatt hour.
