It rains year round in Germany with clouds covering the skies for about two-thirds of all daylight hours. Yet the country has managed to become the world's leading solar power generator with 55 per cent of the world's photovoltaic (PV) power, generated on solar panels set up between the Baltic Sea and the Black Forest.
That amounts so far to just 3 per cent of 'Germanys electricity coming from the sun, but the government wants to raise the share of renewable energies to 27 per cent by 2020, up from 13 per cent.
It is a thriving industry with booming exports that has created tens of thousands of jobs in recent years, posting growth rates that surpassed the optimistic forecasts made by the fathers of a pioneering 2000 renewable energy law.
This law, known by the acronym EEG (meaning EnergieEinspeiseGesetz, Renewable Energy Act, not Emirates Environment Group) has helped this cloudy, rainy country on the northern rim of central Europe to become a solar giant.
There are now more than 300,000 photovoltaic systems in (the energy law had planned for 100,000) spread out across the country.
Legions of homeowners, farmers and small businesses are capitalizing on the government-backed march into renewable energy, being at the vanguard of a grassroots movement in the fight against climate change.
"It's grown much faster than anyone thought it would," said Juergen Trittin, the former Environment Minister who masterminded the scheme – At the time, he was mocked at for his claims it would create jobs and not hurt the economy.
There are now 250,000 jobs in in the renewables energy sector. Asbeck expects the number of jobs in solar power alone to double to 90,000 over the next five years and hit 200,000 in 2020.
The law has also since served as a model for other countries including Spain, , , and .
At the heart of the scheme is a "feed-in tariff" giving anyone who generates power from solar PV, wind or hydro a guaranteed payment from the local power company. The power firms are obliged to buy solar electricity for 49 cents per kilowatt hour - or nearly four times market rates.
This can work out at a better return than putting money in the bank. So despite the cloudy weather, the investment pays for itself within 10 years: 's photovoltaic systems generate now about 3,000 megawatts of power - 1,000 times more than in 1990
There are some critics of the solar power incentives who want the government to phase out the programme faster than now planned. The lucrative feed-in-tariffs are, however, guaranteed for 20 years for all existing owners.
Gerhard Mueller-Westermeyer, a climate researcher at the German national weather service (DWD), said most of is covered by clouds between five and six eighths of the time and there are only a handful of days each year with no clouds at all. Many German towns have annual sunshine of some 1,500 hours - about half as much as in Spain.
"Obviously, there would be a better return on solar panels set up in sunnier places like Africa ," he said.
What about here, in the UAE?
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