Until the great accident of Tchernobyl I was a supporter of the Atomic Energy. I trusted those experts that had told us their ideology of a ‘safe Nuclear Energy’. As a TV journalist and member of a conservative Party, the CDU in Germany, I was blindly believing the energy experts. But the disaster of Tchernobyl was a wake up call and eventually I started to make up my mind seriously. Tchernobyl was my ‘Damascus event’.

In the meantime I did learn a few things:

• The Sun sends us every second 10,000 to 15,000 more energy than man on Earth is currently consuming
• The wind streams contain 80 times more exploitable energy than we need
• 10 times more biomass is growing than our total energy needs
• Just the hydro energy contains as much energy as we consume in one single day
• The marine currents and the wave energy can give us at least 100 times the energy we need
• The geothermal energy offers a multiple of our needs. 99% of our globe is more than 1000°C hot.

Hence, also in practice the direct solar energy or the indirect ones of wind, water, and biomass are more than sufficient to satisfy the energy hunger of almost 7 billion people. The Working Group ‘Solar Energy for Environment and Development’ of the United Nations stated: “It is well established that the over-all potential of the Renewable Energies lies in the order of magnitude of 10,000 times the world’s current energy demand”.

The Sun is the motor of everything that happens on our planet.

She is 5 billion years old and will continue to shine for 4.5 billion years more. Each year she sends us 350 million billion (350 000 000 000 000 000) kWh of radiation energy to our planet. All sources of energy on Earth we owe to the Sun: the wood of the forests and the vegetation in the fields, but also the deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas, that stored the Sun’s energy over millions of years. Moreover, the Sun drives the water circuits in the seas and rivers.

The Sun is the source of all life. She heats our planet, gives us light, and provides the plants with energy for the photosynthesis. This is the most important chemical reaction on Earth giving life to plants, animals, and man. And even during night the Moon and the planets reflect the Sun’s rays to Earth. The nuclear reactor ‘Sun’ differs from the nuclear power plants on Earth in that it is safe for accidents and nuclear radiation, needs no recycling of atomic waste, and provides all people with energy free of charge.

Just the solar radiation that reaches the Earth this day could meet our energy demand for the next 180 years. The Sun is our only inexhaustible source of energy. Buying fruits mostly in the super markets, warm meals in the canteen, and milk packed in plastic bags, we tend to forget how all this comes about. We owe the cow and the fruit tree, the cereals and the electricity from the wall socket – just like our own life – to the Sun’s energy. No Sun, no life. The Sun is the trade secret of our existence. The Sun’s rays are the great gift of the Cosmos to us. The Sun was and is the one and only income of our planet. Since millennia we live from these gains. For all that the Sun is tragically and terribly undervalued.

The astrophysicist Klaus Fuhrmann from Munich University has calculated the following negative scenario for the Sun:

• The global mean temperature today is 15.9°C
• If we had no Sun anymore, tomorrow we had globally -15°C
• Just after 3 days without our Sun, our temperature would have been declined to -40°C, all schools would be closed
• After 4 days without the Sun we would have -80°C, no car engine could start
• After a week the temperature would have been declinedcome down to -173°C, all life went numb
• After 4 weeks or so there would be left no plants, no animals, and no men. Our Earth would be just a big cemetery. And there would be nobody left to complain about it

If we have at our latitudes in central Europe 0°C in Winter and 20°C in Summer then this is the effect of the Sun. Our only need is to level out the difference between Winter and Summer. But as we don’t heat in the Summer we only have to make up for 7°C on the yearly average. And even the balance between Summer and Winter can be achieved by calling on the assistance of the Sun – her sheer unlimited offer of choices. Only that little difference is at stake. The balance between 7 degrees.

In previous civilisations people were more aware of all life’s dependence on the Sun. That’s why she became a basis of religions and cults. Sowing and growth, harvest and feasts were related to her light and her warmth. Only the age of enlightenment and the ‘modern’ churches blurred the awareness of the Sun as the all-embracing donator of life. Jesus still saw it differently: he was talking about his father in Heaven who lets the Sun shine over the righteous and the unjust alike. The ‘Sermon on the Mount’ is full of pictures of God close to nature. But the churches have replaced them by insipid and abstract images of God. In all holly scripts of mankind the Sun is a divine symbol. God: The Sun behind the Sun, the very first energy, to which we owe everything.

But it is encouraging to see that in Germany in 2009 already 800 Christian churches of the big 2 denominations have installed solar installations at their buildings. They offer at last landing decks to the Holy Ghost. Religion becomes concrete and practical. Since the late 2008 also the Vatican got a first large solar PV plant right next to St. Peter’s. Heavenly energy for the German Pope in Rome. The God of the creation is no ascetic, but an inspired artist of sincere cheerfulness who created with no more than Earth and Sun a total artwork. God or the Goddess forgot no smell and no sound, no colour and no form, and not the light and the warmth. All that I had to realise step by step, me, the son of a coal merchant – a representative of the old energy system.

Industrialisation has sidelined the great interrelations of nature. But modern natural science and cosmology give us a new insight of how much we are dependant on the Sun. The Solar Age is coming. If we succeed in the next few decades to employ just a fraction of the Sun’s energy then the energy problem is solved once and forever without contamination of the environment. This inexhaustible and primary source can bring wealth and wellbeing for all people. With solar energy we can start a new era of solar culture as it never existed before.

The greatest danger for the future of mankind is our wrong energy policy. Instead of gaining environment friendly energy from the Sun, the wind, the water, and the biomass, from solar hydrogen and the heat of the Earth we consume in a record time the energy resources oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium. With oil, natural gas, and coal we heat via CO2 emissions the planet and create a hothouse atmosphere hostile to life. And atomic power plants are extremely dangerous by their sheer existence. For a very long time after they will have stopped operating, radioactive waste keeps emitting radiation for over 100000 years.

The year 2010 – the year after the unsuccessful Copenhagen Conference – is a year of decision for a fundamental change of our energy supply. The purpose is to supply the world in the future securely and environment friendly with domestic energy sources in a decentralised manner. Already by 2020 – following calculations of the German Renewable Energy Associations – half of the electricity could become generated from renewable resources. But this requires a new political framework: The future park of power plants must be complemented, next to the speedy deployment of the Renewable Energies, by flexible power plants that are capable of harmonising the variations of electricity demand and supply respectively. Or do we want to go back for decades by allowing for longer operational life times of the atomic power plants and for newly built coal plants? Atomic power plants cement the old park of power plants by their inflexible operability. New power grids and energy stores – indispensable complements of the renewable, decentralised energy supply of tomorrow – are blocked by the inert atomic mastodons. This way, the urgently needed extension of the electric grids does not come in support of the decentralised energies of the future, but as nothing more than the transport of the current from the fossil-atomic Mega power plants. A forward-looking policy offers the chance, via a bonus for combined power plants, to promote investments in biogas storage, batteries, and electric cars and in this way, to prepare the crucial steps for a full supply with Renewable Energies. Just in 2008, by the deployment of the Renewable Energies in Germany, 30000 jobs have been created in the country. Switching to a 100% Renewable Energy supply in Germany and in the European Union could entail, following calculations of the European Commission, 5 million new jobs in Europe and more than 1 million of them in Germany.

Solar Policy is Social Policy

The great philosopher of the Atomic Age, Günther Andres, once said: “Our biggest problem is that we don’t imagine anymore what we are doing”. As I had many political and personal reasons over the last 20 years to change my ideas, I know what Andres had in mind. Only when I started concretely and practically to imagine what atomic power plants and the atomic arms race can do, I was able to shift in thinking. A new awareness is the prerequisite for a new way of thinking and of doing things. As long as I was not aware that with 1 litre of gasoline I pollute 10 000 litres of air, I drove the car some 15 times more km than now. As long as I did not realise that we burn simply with our current energy practice in one year as much oil, coal, and natural gas as was needed to grow in one million years, I saw no reason to think seriously about alternatives to the present energy policy. Before Tchernobyl I was not aware what an atomic accident could mean – hence I was not against atomic power plants. Before the great peace movement in Germany in the early 80s I could not imagine that the atomic arms race could quickly lead to an atomic war – and so I was not against nuclear weapons.

Günther Ander’s philosophy is valid not only in the negative sense but also in the positive. Only by gaining experience with alternatives we strengthen the positive forces of change. Only after we got the experience with alternative sources of energy and developed their implementation, they can get a real chance. A particularly stupid claim is to say: “I am not able to change anything”. Those who say this should not wonder why indeed nothing changes. We got since 18 years on our house in Baden-Baden, Germany, two solar plants, a thermal and a photovoltaic one and I can assure everybody that during that time the Sun never sent us a bill – while the price of the old energies increased fourfold.

A precondition for all real action of change is the deep conviction: “I can if I really want so”. We also have to imagine positively what is possible with alternative energies.

But I also learnt that the old energy economy defends itself massively, with much money and legal expertise against the Renewable Energies. As a TV journalist I had to take my state television station in Germany 8 times to labour court to be able to enlighten also my audience of millions of people about my new findings. Journalism means enlightenment. And this I want to do until the end of my life. To enlighten many so that the “Sun of the Father” (Jesus) does not shine for nothing. No fight, no progress. Brothers, to the Sun, to freedom!

Franz Alt 2010

This text published Franz Alt in the book "Power for the World"