How a small town reclaimed its grid and sparked a community revolution

The latest article in our new economics series looks at what happened when a German utilities contract expired, and one man thought his neighbours could take over.

Martin Rühl never imagined this fight would define the rest of his life. Not for a moment did he reckon it would become so epic in length, in scale, in consequences. He just thought his speck of a town should run its own electricity supply.

A modest proposal, but in the Germany of 2003 it was highly unusual. Gerhard Schröder was still chancellor and, although a social democrat, was pushing through more privatisations of public assets than any other leader in German history. This was in a Europe that had learned from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to stop worrying and start loving the private sector. Now here, swimming against history’s current, was one orderly, slightly anxious engineer. On Rühl’s side were evidence, arguments and expertise. What he lacked was his multinational opponent’s money and firepower. The mismatch produced a battle that lasted years, that set off ripples around Germany and whose lessons should be pondered by anyone who wonders whether Britain could improve how it runs its electricity and gas, its water, its train services. And it kicked off in Wolfhagen, a somnolent town whose biggest previous claim to fame was that one of the Brothers Grimm had stayed in one of its half-timbered buildings.

Fifteen years ago, Wolfhagen was like thousands of other German towns and cities in leasing its electrical grid for its 14,000 residents to one of the world’s largest energy companies, E.ON. But two things made this place different. First, it still had a Stadtwerke, or municipally owned electricity supplier. Second, it had Rühl, who’d only recently become the Stadtwerke’s boss.


Rühl spotted that E.ON’s 20-year licence was approaching its expiry. Rather than just sign again on the dotted line, he thought Wolfhagen ought to reclaim the grid for itself – and pressed the case repeatedly upon the local council for months. For all the legal and financial advice he’d garnered, Rühl was not at all sure he’d persuade the politicians. “Lots of people were saying something totally different.” Yet, “I knew it was legal and correct, and morally right.”

This programme on BBC 4 tells how residents took over their living spaces and made a much better job of it than the council. So much so that they found that the council was actually starting to do what they were doing elsewhere. They were the first to do this, and have become the model for all other such projects.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b ... et-glasgow

it can be done, just takes the nerve to do it ...