Imagine if your town generated four times more energy than it needed. Imagine no more load-shedding, 100% renewable energy, totally independent from Eskom. This is possible with large-scale community-owned renewable energy projects.

Learn how one small town in Germany became energy independent and now produces far more energy than it uses — its energy park alone generates two and a half times what the town consumes, and counting the solar panels on rooftops across the village, around four times. The surplus is sold, and the income flows back to the community. What did it take to realise a project like this, and what motivated them? What challenges did they face and overcome? How can this model be replicated in other towns and countries?

We visited a real example of this last week in a small town called Saerbeck. We went on a 3-hour bike tour through their “Bioenergy park”. They started offering tours to the general public last year. I first thought it was a walking tour, but after reading the email carefully again, I saw that it is a bike tour. Fortunately, my wife Saskia’s family live close by and were kind enough to lend us their bikes. I can see why they made it a bike tour — the place is huge, and you would not be able to walk through the whole park.

The park at a glance:

• Location: a former army ammunition depot, 3 km north of Saerbeck (population ± 7,200)
• Site: 90 hectares, bought by the municipality for €1.1 million — less than the cost of one wind turbine
• Built: 2011 to 2013
• Total capacity: 33 MW — 7 wind turbines, a solar park and 2 biogas plants
• Total investment: ± €70 million (± R1.4 billion) — around €50 million invested by Saerbeck residents themselves

Wind farm

First, we visited one of the wind turbines. The size of these machines is hard to grasp until you stand next to one. Looking up, what was interesting to see is how flexible they are and how much they move in the wind. From far away I always thought a turbine was a rigid structure, but it actually bends and moves a lot in the wind. Going inside was fascinating — the amount of electronics and switchgear needed to operate it. The tower itself is a stack of 28 concrete rings topped by three steel segments, with a small two-person lift and a ladder running up the inside. Not a job for a person with a fear of heights.

Some facts about the wind turbines:

• Type: Enercon E-101, gearless direct-drive
• Number of turbines: 7
• Hub height: 149 m (199.5 m total to the blade tip — taller than any building in South Africa)
• Rotor diameter: 101 m
• Power: 3 MW each, 21 MW combined
• Energy: around 6.5 million kWh per turbine per year — roughly 45 million kWh combined
• Cost: about €3.6 million (± R70 million) per turbine
• In operation since: autumn 2013

To put one turbine into perspective: 6.5 million kWh a year is enough electricity for roughly 700 to 900 South African households. One machine, powering a small suburb.

What interested me most was the ownership, not the engineering: all seven turbines are owned by five investors, and every single one of them comes from Saerbeck — the municipality owns one, the citizens’ energy cooperative owns another, and local farmers, businesses and private investors own the rest. To keep things fair, the output of all seven turbines is pooled and split equally among the owners, so nobody wins or loses because their turbine happens to stand on a slightly windier spot. It is a simple mechanism, but it removes a whole category of future conflict.

Biogas plant

Next, we visited the biogas plant. Here maize and slurry from the surrounding farms are fermented to produce gas, which drives two generators producing electricity and heat. The plant is not owned by an energy company — it belongs to 16 local farmers.

The clever part is not how they generate, but when.

In the beginning, the generators ran day and night. But at certain times, there was so much wind and solar power on the grid that they had to pay money to export their electricity. Their solution: build two large gas storage tanks. Now the plant stores its gas and only runs the generators when the grid actually needs the power — mostly at night and on cloudy, windless days. In those hours, prices are high and every kWh earns proper money.

So, while the wind turbines and solar park produce whenever nature decides, the biogas plant produces whenever the grid demands. Together they act like one complete power station. For us in South Africa, sitting with load-shedding and time-of-use tariffs, this is the big lesson: producing energy is easy. Producing it at the right time is where the value is.

And nothing goes to waste — the leftover material from fermentation goes back onto the fields as fertiliser.

Some facts about the biogas plant:

• Owned by: 16 local farmers (with a regional farming cooperative and the plant manufacturer)
• Feedstock: maize and slurry from local farms
• Power: ± 4 MW (two generators)
• Energy: ± 8.7 million kWh per year — enough for ± 2,400 German households

Solar farm

We cycled through the large solar park. What makes it unusual is where the panels stand: mounted on the sloped southern sides of 74 old ammunition bunkers. Where the army once stored munitions, the village now harvests sunlight. The panels are 240 W modules from 2012 — modest by today’s standards, converting about 15% of the sunlight into electricity, where a modern panel manages around 25%.

The €9.5 million solar park is majority-owned by the citizens’ cooperative “Energie für Saerbeck”. When the cooperative needed €2.4 million in equity to make it happen, the people of Saerbeck raised it in 14 days. The minimum stake was €1,000 — on average, each member invested about €9,000. Four hundred ordinary residents, and two weeks. That is what community buy-in looks like when people trust the numbers.

The panels themselves tell their own story about how fast this technology is moving. A modern panel of exactly the same size as these delivers 440–460 W — nearly double the power from the same area. If Saerbeck were to repower the whole solar park with today’s panels, the same bunkers would produce roughly 10 MW instead of 6 MW, without using a single square metre more land. And here is the encouraging part for us in South Africa: Saerbeck made the numbers work with 2012 technology at 2012 prices. Anyone starting today gets almost twice the power per square metre, at a fraction of the cost per watt. The model was proven with worse tools than the ones we have now.

Some facts about the solar energy plant:

• Cost: ± €9.5 million (± R190 million)
• Power: 6 MW (5.8 MW on the bunkers, plus a 200 kW rooftop system)
• Energy: ± 5.7 million kWh per year — enough for ± 1,600 German households
• Ownership: majority-owned (63%) by the citizens’ cooperative
• In operation since: mid 2012

How did it start?

The Bioenergiepark did not start with money — it started with a competition. In 2008, the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia announced a contest for the title of “Climate Municipality of the Future”. Saerbeck entered against 60 other towns and won in 2009, with a plan of more than 150 individual measures. The goal: cover the town’s entire energy demand from renewables by 2030.

The opportunity came when the army closed its ammunition depot north of the village. The municipality bought the 90-hectare site for just €1.1 million — less than the price of a single wind turbine — and converted it into the Bioenergiepark between 2011 and 2013, managing the project itself. The mayor described the journey as one of effort, worries and sleepless nights. But by 2013, the town had already reached its goal of producing more electricity than it consumes — 17 years ahead of schedule.

What can a South African town take from this?

Saerbeck is not a blueprint we can photocopy. Germany had feed-in tariffs that guaranteed a price for renewable energy, and municipalities there can own their local grid — two things we cannot assume in South Africa. But the principles transfer directly.

Ordinary people can be the investors. A cooperative with a low entry point turned hundreds of residents into owners instead of bystanders. That changed the politics of the project completely — nobody protests against their own wind turbine.

Generate when it pays, not just when you can. Saerbeck added gas storage so the biogas generators only run when the electricity is actually needed. In South Africa, with time-of-use tariffs and load-shedding, storage-first thinking is even more valuable than it is in Germany.

Start with land nobody else wants. An old ammunition depot became a 90-hectare energy park. Every municipality in South Africa is sitting on underused land.

A town of 7,200 people did this. It took them about four years from decision to full operation. The question is not whether it is possible — Saerbeck settled that. The question is which South African town goes first.

[Watch the full tour in our YouTube video — link here]