Germany sells guidebooks on renewable energy sites
Guidebooks detailing nearly 200 green projects around the country proves to be a hit with tourists as first edition is sold out
Komila Nabiyeva for Climate News Network, part of the Guardian Environment Network theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 June 2014
Visitors enjoy a ride at the 'Wunderland Kalkar' amusement park, in Kalkar, Germany. It was once the 'Schneller Brueter' nuclear power plant, which was never used, and turned into a hotel and leisure centre. Photograph: Victoria Bonn-Meuser/Corbis
Wind turbines and solar panels: do you love them or hate them? Do you think of renewable energy as the way to a greener future, or an awful blight on the present?
Either way, growing numbers of German communities think they have found a silver lining: theyre touting renewables as tourist attractions. A guidebook is now available, listing about 200 green projects around the country which it thinks are, in the travel writers time-hallowed phrase, worth the detour. The publication, which has already run to a second edition after the first sold out, was supported by Germanys Renewable Energies Agency.
Nuclear power stations are not top of every tourists must-see list. But the books author, Martin Frey, says a nuclear plant in Kalkar, a town on Germanys border with the Netherlands, is the worlds safest. It pulls in more than half a million visitors annually.
Safe? It should be, because local protests driven partly by the 1986 Chernobyl accident meant it never started operation. Now its an amusement park offering hotels with all-inclusive holidays, restaurants and merry-go-rounds. Its most popular attraction is a gigantic cooling tower with a climbing wall outside and a carousel inside....
more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/11/germany-sells-guidebooks-on-renewable-energy-sites
The US could have been Germany. Maybe it's not too late. But
the latest "URGENT PRIORITY" for the White House is spending >$58 million dollars on Ukraine and sending warships to the Iraq disaster.