 Thank you for inviting me to explain the German energy vendor. It is something that you can understand only if you know a little bit more about our mentality and our domestic debate. But it is something that you can explain easily to everybody around the world in order to understand it. Why did we take such a far-going decision? Well, there was no other issue that has divided Germany more as the issue of nuclear power plants. I cannot see in any other country, not in the UK, not in France, not in Italy, not in the US, certainly not in China or in the Czech Republic, a similar debate that has hijacked the political debate in Germany for more than 30 years. The Green Party was founded as a result of this debate and the resistance against the use of nuclear energy has spread around the country for more than 30 years and after the Fukushima incident, there was no longer any chance of public acceptance for the use of nuclear energy. So whether it was right or wrong, that's not the matter. And the question is, you cannot on the long run implement an energy policy that has no backing by 75% of the people in your country. And therefore we had to come to an end of the debate and what we have decided is to close down all our nuclear power plants by 2022. We have closed down already eight of them. We are still an electricity exporting country. The supply situation still is rather stable compared to countries where nuclear energy is no problem like the US. And we have to, and we have of course to replace all these nuclear power plants by different sources of electricity production. This is not a big challenge because when you compare France with the chair of nuclear electricity today is 75%. When you compare that with Germany with the chair of only 25% of nuclear energy, then you can see that it's an easy task just to replace some nuclear power plants by some let's say fossil fuel power plants. That was from the beginning on, never the ambition. The ambition was to implement what we call in the meantime energy vendor, energy transition, energy turnaround. There is no correct English translation for that. But it means and implies the entire revolution of the energy supply sector within a period of 30 to 40 years. And this is something that is quite demanding because Germany is one of the most successful and competitive European countries worldwide. And we have struggled very hard to restore that degree of competitiveness that we have today. So we have to be very cautious in approach and very conscious that everything we are doing could have an immediate effect on the competitiveness of our economy and our business sector. And this is why it is so extremely important to have a public debate on the aims and the targets of this energy vendor. Well, we are the first industrialized country of this size that has decided to base its almost entire energy supply on renewable energies. According to schedule we would have 80% of renewable energy supply by 2050. That means we have now, by the end of last year, we had 23% of electricity from renewable sources. That's for a small portion of water. But then to a very large extent, wind, electricity from biomass and electricity from solar panels. And all of them combined 23%. This year probably 26% at the end of the year. More than 35%, probably more than 40% by the year 2020. And then until 2050, a share of 80%. That's quite a challenge because it means a complete and entire revolution of our supply system in previous years. The supply was organized in a way that the power plants were located in areas where there was enormous demand for electricity. So in the Ruhrgebiet, in Bavaria, in the Rhine area, you have lots of power plants and that meant that the grid was not very extended. It was a very highly developed grid, but in a regional dimension in the first place. And now we see renewable energies implemented everywhere in Germany and that means we have to completely reorganize our grid infrastructure, for example. Many other challenges as well. And why did we do it? Well, there is one simple reason and this reason is called sustainability. Sustainability probably is the biggest challenge for our generation. We are today living in a fast-growing world of almost 8 billion people. The problem is not the number of people but the economic growth that is coming from all these people, especially in Asia. An economy like China is doubling every 10 years, quadrupling every 20 years, and at the same time the energy and electricity demand is doubling and quadrupling. And China, for example, is in big trouble how to provide enough electricity for all these people with rapidly growing energy demand. They are constructing new coal-fired power plants one every week, more than 50 every year. They are constructing new nuclear power plants and still they cannot satisfy the growing demand for energy. And when we look at the entire world scale, then you can imagine what it would mean if we would base the growing demand for electricity and energy for a world of 8 billion people, a growing world of 8 billion people, almost entirely on nuclear energy and fossil energy. It would mean that we would release much more CO2 into the atmosphere than we have done over the last 100 years. It is rapidly increasing and I'm not a religious believer in climate change. Well, there is climate change. There is no doubt. But I'm not a religious believer that it is made by mankind. Many researchers say it is made by mankind. Others say, well, we doubt, but I mean when we know in 30 years from now, then it's probably too late to change it. So that means we have to act now if we want to preserve a good environment for our children and grandchildren, then we have to act now. And that means we have not to reduce, but we have to stabilize the consumption of fossil energies. Even if we would reduce the share of fossil energies with regard to the entire energy consumption, we would probably still see an increase of the absolute numbers of tons of coal and oil and gas that will be used to satisfy that demand. And therefore, we cannot oblige countries like China, India, Indonesia to reduce economic growth in order to protect the environment. They always will choose in favor of economic growth because they want to have washing machines, TV, air conditioning, cars, everything that we have for so many years already. And the only way of solving that deadly race for energy is to provide patterns and models that would allow us to combine economic growth with the needs of a sound environment. That's the challenge. And this cannot be done by countries in East Asia or Africa. It can be done only by the developed countries in Europe, in the US, where we have the technological skills to develop new approaches and new systems. It's also in the technological interest of Europe. Germany is one of the highly reputed countries with regard to engineers, patents, etc. Germany has missed the revolution in the entertainment industry in the 70s that came from Japan and Korea. We have always missed the digital revolution that came from Silicon Valley. So we have missed a number of basic innovations over the last decade. And now our presumption is that we are the eve of a deep-going revolution in the field of energy supply. It has more or less a similar decree than the digital revolution of the internet. And therefore, if Europe could manage not only to teach others and to provide models and patents for energy supply, but if we could manage to be the first in this energy revolution, it would guarantee us a competitive advantage. There are other regions in the world that would last many, many years and help us a lot to economically survive in a globalized world. This is the reason why we believe it's not just for the environment, but it's also for our economy, a good thing to develop new solutions in the field of energy supply. And this is what we have to do over the next couple of years. We have to encourage a wave of innovation that would cover everything from the production and the distribution of energy to the issue of energy efficiency to the design of the products, to methods of production. It would cover almost the entire economic activities of a country like Germany. And this is why I, in one of my first speeches when I was appointed minister, have said, well, it is the biggest challenge for Germany since the reconstruction after the war and unification after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We don't see any other technological economic challenge of such an importance for the country. So what do we have to do? We have, for the first time, the first challenge, of course, is to have an energy production that is based increasingly on renewable energies. Yes, that is something that we have successfully achieved by providing a very generous feed-in tariff scheme. When you buy a windmill or when you have solar panels on your roof, you are entitled to feed-in tariffs for 20 years, fixed feed-in tariffs. That was very important over the last 10 years because you could earn perhaps 1% interest with a traditional financial instrument, but you could earn easily 6% to 15% by investing into renewable energies. So that meant that the capital, the international capital and investment moving around desperately looking for a safe harbor was able to say, well, we have a safe harbor, we can earn a lot of money and at the same time do something positive in favor of the environment. That's an extremely attractive combination. So we have really initiated a wave of investment in this field. For example, when you look at our solar panels over the last, we have a feed-in tariff system since the year 2000, but two-thirds of the capacities in Germany have been implemented within the last three years. It was an enormous boom, like the housing boom in other countries and different booms. I'm always very suspicious when I'm talking about booms because my experience is that a boom will last longer or shorter, but it comes to an end one day and then you'll have collateral damages. But today we have in Germany 32,000 megawatt solar panels, and that means in a sunny day we will produce by these solar panels between 11 in the morning and 3 o'clock in the afternoon the electricity amount that corresponds to 20 nuclear power plants. That's enormous. But what is different? The nuclear power plants in the past have produced it in a very, in a very equal way and today it is produced only when we have sunshine, that means over day, and it is produced especially in summer and not in winter, and it is changing every day, so you have to provide completely different instruments for keeping your crit and your supply system intact. The same applies, by the way, to the windmills. We have a similar number of windmills. We have enormous amounts of biomass, electricity production, and all this has been encouraged without any concrete idea of how to organize the process. It was all done by private initiative and it was done in a completely different way. So today we have most of the renewable energy capacities in the north. We have most of the demand in the south. That means we need long distance cables in order to have sufficient capacities in the grid. We will have technical problems. Technical problems because the bulk of the renewable energy production always is in summer. In summer we can easily produce in a couple of years 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 megawatt. But in summer, when everybody is sitting in the garden or swimming in the pool, spending holidays in the Mediterranean, then we have a very low energy need demand, and then we have a surplus of energy. That is enormous. And it would mean that we cannot find people who would buy that, so we would be faced with negative prices on the electricity exchange market. And in the winter, when people are back home from Mallorca, when people are no longer in their gardens and in the swimming pool, but producing in the factory and sitting at home watching TV, we have a very modest production of renewable energies because there is less sunshine, there is less wind, and there is less biomass. And even in winter it could happen, for example, between what happened between Christmas and New Year, that we would produce more electricity than we need because everybody was on a Christmas holiday, leave, all the companies were closed, the public administration, the schools were closed, and then it was warm, sunny, windy weather, and we had much more electricity than we needed. But it could also happen that every four or five years, perhaps every 10 years, we would have a situation in January, minus 15 degrees for almost one week, brilliant sunshine, but 20 centimeters snow and solar panels and no wind at all. And then we would have a record demand for electricity, but a very low production of renewables. That means we have not just to think about renewable energies, we have to think about backup capacities, we have to think about storage of energy, we have to think about new ways of demand side and supply side management. And now you would probably say, well, my God, these stupid Germans, how can they, how can they commit to such a project if it is terribly difficult? Well, when I was invited in Paris to explain it to the French, to a committee of the French assembly and because they are interested in the transition energetique in my country, then I said, well, I consider this not as a problem, I consider it as a challenge from part of the problems of Sunday, because we can see that in Germany today, tens of thousands of engineers from energy supply companies, from grid companies, from universities, from local and municipal companies are thinking and researching day and night on what they can do to solve all these problems and to solve the problems in a way that they would not lose but earn money and how we can use the surplus in summer in a cheap way, when electricity is cheap, how we can provide more energy in winter, how we can develop storage capacity. There is a concept that is called power to gas, where you can use the wind energy in summer that is not needed in order to produce gas that can be used in winter to produce electricity again. It will take some years to come to good solutions but one thing is for sure, I cannot see any other country where you have so many people, engineers and others thinking about these challenges and I have no doubt at the end of the day we will see solutions in this field. There is an issue of financing and this is important for all European countries in financial trouble and public money is running out in most of the countries, also in Germany. We have inserted in our constitution a sovereign debt break and that means we cannot just continue like we did over the last couple of 40 years and that means we have to look at the expenses for our business sector and we have to look at the costs for private people, for pensioners for example. We had an increase in electricity prices over the last three years of only 3% for energy intensive companies because we have good ways to protect them, they are exempted from the renewable energy fee but it means others have to pay more and therefore for private customers the energy price went up by 20% and for the rest of the German industry it went up by 25%. That is something you can support for two or three years but then it has to come back to a normal development and there is another reason why it has to become cheaper and better at a time because if we want to sell it as a pattern to China, to India, to African countries then it has to be affordable, it has to be cheap. We can afford as Germany a renewable electricity that is unaffordable for countries like Kenya, Uganda or Ivory Coast. That means in Germany we have to develop not just the technical solutions we have to develop also what we call scale effects what we call a cost-decreation and therefore I am working very hard to reform our law on renewable energies in a way that we will have a decresion an overall decresion of the feed-in tariffs and I have managed as far as solar panels are concerned last year to amend that legislation in a way that we have an automatic monthly decresion of feed-in tariffs for solar panels every month and at the same time we have stated by the law that as soon as we will have reached more than 50,000 megawatt of solar panels in Germany there will be no new feed-in tariffs anymore. And what did we see? We have seen over the last couple of months there is still a high degree of new solar panels in Germany probably 4,000 megawatt this year but it is no longer costly because it is no longer feed in the electricity grid it is now used for the own consumption of the owner of this panel because this is what I call an indirect subsidy because when you produce your own electricity on top of your roof as a discounter of food for example, Aldi and then in summer you have an enormous demand for electricity for air condition and for your cooling and freezing machines and then you can use the solar panels on the roof that could use electricity at 10 cent per kilowatt hour and instead of 17 or 18 when you take it from the public grid and for a private owner it is even more attractive because they would have to pay 28 cent per kilowatt hour and they could produce it at 12 cent per kilowatt hour that makes it very attractive. So you see, we have a lot of problems that we have to tackle problems that are chances we have in the first stage neglected the European dimension of energy transition in Germany from a legal point of view as you know in this institute this was not an infraction because the Lisbon Treaty clearly states the energy mix falls under the national competence of every member state but nevertheless we all know that if we want to make Europe a success and insist on legal clauses and the treaties alone we have to have a cooperation with our neighbors and our friends in Europe and this is why I'm now travelling around explaining what we are doing and looking for a cross-border cooperation because it is my personal conviction that if we can organise this kind of transition within the European context it would become safer, it could become cheaper and it would become a model for other countries worldwide I have taken an initiative and I will have invited ministers to Berlin at the beginning of June the minister from China, from India, from the UK, from France to establish a renewable club where we want to promote politically worldwide the idea of renewable energies and surely we are not alone in the universe that is what many people in Germany think I think we are the only country yes we are the only country with such a far-going ambition but when you look at Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia today is the country with the highest budget for renewable energies if you look at China they will bypass Germany with solar cells in China by the year 2015 if you look at Morocco, if you look at South Africa if you look at many countries of India worldwide and then you see there is a revolution at the beginning and I hope that we all are ready when it breaks out and that we can benefit from it thank you so much for your attention