Essay by RWE Executive: On Green Technology, Germany Is the Envy of the World

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But how will innovative technologies such as offshore wind parks, electric cars or fusion reactors be brought to market? Emissions trading alone won't be a sufficiently strong driving force. In order to give new technologies the push they need, we require the kind of development programs we devised in Germany with the Renewable Energy Sources Act under which the electricity user helps pay for the use of renewable energies. It's a successful model that has turned Germany into one of the world's most important markets for wind power. We lead Europe in terms of installed wind power capacity. Without the Renewable Energy Sources Act, there wouldn't be any multi-megawatt machines Made in Germany.

But the energy act has also provided false incentives that are costing us all a lot of money. German electricity customers pay €2 billion per year to promote photovoltaic systems -- for a period of 20 years. In this way, a total of €40 billion is being wasted on silicon solar cells that will never competitively produce electricity in Germany. We will spend decades committing financial resources to building structures that won't help us protect the environment. This money could be far better invested and deliver a far greater reduction in CO2.

Wouldn't it make sense to invest in photovoltaic systems and solar thermal energy plants in regions where the sun shines three times more often and the cost of producing power is therefore three times cheaper? European electricity customers would surely be more willing to help finance the ambitious Desertec project to produce solar power in North Africa. It would also make much more sense to finally start developing storage solutions for weather-dependent wind power. One idea would be to get a large fleet of electric cars on the road as quickly as possible. They could be charged up with low-cost wind-generated power at night, a time when much of the power generated by wind turbines goes wasted.

Unfortunately, the German government hasn't set itself very ambitious goals in this respect. The planned number of one million electric cars by 2020 is too small. We mustn't close our eyes to any new visionary technology. The fusion reactor, for example, seems to have been completely forgotten; the government is doing far too little to support research in this area. Who is to say that it won't at some point become a key factor in solving our energy problems? The government's budget for funding energy research was halved in the 1990s to around €400 million. An industrial nation like Germany needs to do far more than that. We need a massive expansion of energy-related research without taboos.

A lot of financial resources will be required to solve these problems. Much too much money has been wasted on photovoltaic development. It's high times those funds were redirected at new and better future technologies.

The government was wise to discover nuclear power as a source of funding for the new technologies. Prolonging the running times for the nuclear reactors hated by so many will free up billions of euros for that purpose. In addition, reactors can be powered up and down far more flexibly than most other forms of power stations. That makes them a highly effective way to complement the weather-dependent wind turbines. Switching off nuclear power stations entirely endangers the expansion of wind power.

Once the threat posed by global warming is great enough, new alliances will emerge of which we can only dream of today. It's the job of governments to turn these dreams into reality.

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• Part 1: On Green Technology, Germany Is the Envy of the World
• Part 2: Strong Promotion Needed for Innovative Technologies