Giving Compass' Take:

• This Stanford Social Innovation Review post profiles a grassroots clean energy movement in Germany called “Energiewende," which emphasizes community control.

• Amid the dire reports about climate change, what can other countries learn from Germany's example? How can we empower citizens to engage in sustainable energy solutions?

• Elsewhere in Europe, Norway is focusing on being energy positive to fight climate change.

Deep in the Black Forest, not far from the French and Swiss borders, the energy collective EWS is one of Germany’s most storied clean-energy enterprises. In its offices and corridors, one term crops up in just about every discussion: “Energiewende” (“energy transition”), the moniker for the country’s historic switch from fossil fuels and nuclear power to sustainable energy. In the 1980s, the Schönau “energy rebels,” as EWS’s founders originally branded themselves, trailblazed Germany’s earliest grassroots initiatives to cut energy consumption and grow renewables. Ever since, EWS has remained an idealistic pioneer and unrelenting advocate of community energy projects, determined to help Germany meet, or even exceed, its climate-protection pledges.

EWS, which stands for Elektrizitätswerke Schönau (Power Company Schönau), is a one-of-a-kind, many-sided cooperative, collectively owned and guided by 6,500 members, that not only distributes and produces green energy but also pushes technical and market innovations. It functions as a multiplier for like-minded, noncorporate clean-energy projects and as a tenacious political lobbyist for the cause of citizen energy in the Bundestag, too. The enterprise also looks beyond Germany’s borders—climate change being, after all, a global phenomenon—to the rest of Europe, to Asia and Africa, and even across the Atlantic to the United States, where in 2011 EWS cofounder Ursula Sladek visited President Barack Obama to tell him about renewable energy in Germany.

Read the full article about clean energy efforts in Germany by Paul Hockenos at Stanford Social Innovation Review.