Josef Göppel

Josef Göppel was born on 16 August 1950 on a small farm in the Franconian village of Rauenzell near Ansbach. He grew up with a strong attachment to the land and became a forester. He worked as a forestry engineer for 28 years – mostly outdoors. Göppel is married and has four daughters.

In 1972, he became involved in the local politics of his home region. After eight years in the Bavarian State Parliament, he was  elected directly to the German Bundestag in 2002. All his political activities  focus on living and working in harmony with nature.

Göppel has been the head of the CSU’s environmental working group since 1991, and has played a significant role in shaping the party’s environmental platform. Within the party, he has a reputation as a sometimes difficult and persistent unconventional thinker. The media regard him as the green conscience of his party.

As a forestry engineer, in 1986 he founded the Land Care Association of Middle Franconia. His aim was to overcome the bitter divisions that existed at that time between environmentalists and farmers. The initiative became a success, and today there are 155 Land Care Associations in 14 German Länder, with equal representation of farmers, conservationists and local politicians. Göppel has been head of the German Association for Landcare since 1993. The network Landcare Europe was founded at EU level in 2016.

In the mid-90s he joined the International Eco-Social Forum and worked on the Global Marshall Plan Initiative.

In 2005 he founded the Renewable Energies Network in the Middle Franconia region together with business representatives, craftspeople and scientists. In 2014 this led to the creation of the Franconia Regional Electricity cooperative, which aims to sell electricity directly to those in the immediate vicinity of the production sites. 

He stood firmly by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015, when her generous policy of receiving Syrian refugees came under harsh criticism from the CDU and CSU. 

A key cross-party initiative in the German Bundestag can be traced back to Göppel: members of government and opposition parties joined forces in the Future Forum on the Environment, where they made the case for more sustainable environmental policies.

In the Bundestag elections, Göppel’s personal votes have far surpassed the second votes for his party every time; in 2013, the figures stood at 53.3 percent to 47.6 percent. 

An outsider’s view proves revealing – the following text appeared in the local press after an appearance at the Nürnberger Presseclub:

"Göppel is a true conservative. He wants nothing more than to preserve creation. The CSU Member of the Bundestag approaches politics through the lenses of his Christian faith and his long experience working with nature. He has been known to get on the wrong side of people, whether it be his fellow party members or supporters of conventional growth policies. He was the only member of the CSU to vote against generating electricity from nuclear power in Germany long before the start of the energy transition."

Political Career

•1972-2004 Herrieden town council

•1974-1994 Middle Franconia District Council

•since 1991 Chairman of the CSU environmental working group

•1986 founded the first Land Care Association 

•1994-2002 Bavarian State Parliament

•since 1996 Ansbach county council

•since 2002 German Bundestag

"The energy transition will be for rural areas what industrialization was for cities," explained Germany's Agrokraft at the recent meeting on energy cooperatives. Today, Renewables International takes a look at the presentations, which are only available in German.
 
As Renewables International recently reported, Germany's energy cooperatives met for the first time at a national meeting to coordinate their actions and voiced their interests in the debate about Germany's energy transition. The presentations are available online at the conference's website in German.

The idea of cooperatives goes back to Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, who pioneered the idea of rural credit unions and cooperative banks in the 19th century. Today, his idea – if a single person can't do it, a cooperative can – partly lives on in energy cooperatives.

From district heating networks to photovoltaic roofs over bleachers at sports fields, energy cooperatives allow people to pool their financial resources and technical expertise to move beyond mere solar roofs on individual homes. Citizens – even those without their own homes – can chip in in amounts starting at 100 to 500 euros generally to take part in local projects. The returns can reach up to six percent; in the case of the Odenwald energy cooperative – which has invested in 74 PV arrays, two PV power plants, a micro hydro plant, and four wind turbines – the returns over the past three years have consistently been between 3-4 percent.

Northern Frisia is arguably where the energy cooperative movement got started in 1991, when the German feed-in tariffs for small hydropower and wind power were first offered. Today, more than 90 percent of all wind turbines (approximately 650 with an average turbine size of 1.5 megawatts) in the county are owned by local citizens. One reason for the popularity of wind turbines in the county is, no doubt, the constant winds on the coast; another is that the farming communities are close to sea level, and therefore keenly aware of the impact of an overheating climate.
 
Northern Frisia plans to found a citizen-owned grid firm by next year to increase acceptance of newly constructed power lines. At present, bottlenecks on the grid restrict the take-up of additional wind power. Shares in this cooperative are expected to cost 1,000 euros and be issued first to county locals, then to citizens of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and only then to the market, including institutional buyers. The option is even more interesting for citizen investors because grid operators can have a return of up to 9.05 percent on their investments in grid infrastructure in Germany – far more than a normal citizen can expect to get elsewhere.

One of the most impressive instances of citizens overtaking their grid is probably EWS Schönau (PDF), which has seen its revenue grow from around 14 billion euros in 2004 to around 94 billion in 2011. During that timeframe, the number of customers served has also risen from around 24,000 to more than 120,000. The company, which is also a cooperative, sells shares starting at 100 euros. The number of shares has grown from 10,230 to around 150,000 since 2008.

Green power does not have to be more expensive than the conventional mix, as the case of the cooperative in Lichtenau-Asseln demonstrates. It offers electricity to its customers at a price some five percent below our RWE's standard retail package.

(Craig Morris)

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