The Story of Ursula Sladek

[Murray]

Ursula Sladek and how she took over her local power grid.

Ms. Sladek’s revolution involves a somewhat less familiar realm: the generation and marketing of electricity.

In 1986, she was a homemaker and the mother of four school-age children when some radioactive isotopes blown into the air by the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine landed around her town, Schönau, in the Black Forest in western Germany. Her children could not play outdoors for two weeks; 25 years later, that forest’s mushrooms are still considered unsafe. Her attention turned to finding ways of rendering nuclear power unnecessary in Germany.

While she has not succeeded at that, she has achieved a related goal that was not on her radar when she first plunged into energy policy. She created a small local power company, Schönau Power Supply, that provides electricity from renewable energy sources to a small portion of the German grid.

Her company gets much of its energy from a patchwork of small local energy producers, including a handful of hydropower operations, solar panels, some wind turbines, and about 20 washing-machine-size co-generation plants in people’s homes that produce both heat for the home and electricity for the grid. more

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz4XpBkR7tM