Public opinion turned abruptly against nuclear power in 1986, after the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine sent radioactive fallout over northern Europe and made West Germans uneasy about their own reactors. Popular concern after Chernobyl froze construction of additional reactors and fueled calls from the political left to scrap the nation’s existing nuclear plants. The chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, refused to abandon this source of carbon-free electricity, declaring climate change to be Germany’s top environmental challenge.

In this way, Kohl forged a political consensus for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But so far it is renewable energy, not nuclear, that has reaped the benefits. In 1990, the German government passed its path-breaking Electricity Feed-in Law, compelling utilities to buy all the power that renewable sources on their grid could generate—and at premium prices. The Feed-in Law thus set off a wind-power boom.

In 2001 that boom boomeranged on nuclear energy under Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder. His Green Party–Social Democrat coalition cited wind energy as proof that Germany had an alternative to dirty coal and Russian natural gas in replacing nuclear power. Schröder’s government passed legislation to shut down all of the country’s reactors by 2022.

For that to happen, though, offshore wind power would be key. Germans, like most people, love the idea of wind power, but not all of them like the idea of having their landscapes marred by 130-meter-tall wind turbines. What is more, thanks largely to the 1990 law, most of the sites on land best suited to wind generation were already occupied. So installing turbines in their offshore territorial waters seemed like the best way around these obstacles. And because winds are in general stronger offshore than onshore, planting turbines far out in the sea promised twice as many hours of peak generation for each megawatt of installed capacity (assuming that offshore equipment functions reliably over time).

With these virtues in mind, the government passed its Renewable Energy Act in 2000, extending the favorable tariffs to wind farms in Germany’s North Sea and Baltic waters. By 2002—the year in which annual installations on land peaked at 3240 MW—developers had filed 29 proposals for offshore farms that together would have had a generating capacity of 63 GW, which was equal to half of Germany’s entire installed capacity at the time. Germany’s ministry for the environment (its Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit, or BMU) forecast that 500 MW of offshore wind would be operating by 2006 and that an additional 2500 MW would come on line by 2010.

Then the plans crashed headlong into political reality. Almost immediately, conservationists and marine ecologists questioned proposed incursions into near-shore areas where millions of migratory birds breed and feed. The BMU handled that challenge by studying it carefully and then, in 2005, designating permissible zones for wind development that were far from shore and in deep water.

As the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden pressed forward with pioneering wind farms installed in water less than 20 meters deep and within 15 kilometers of the shore, Germany’s maritime authority offered developers 20- to 40¿¿¿meter waters, located for the most part 40 km or more from the coast. That raised the cost and technical risk of German projects. Earlier, the German government had mandated a tariff of at most 9.1 euro cents (13 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind-generated electricity, no more than its neighbors were offering, despite the higher costs and risks.

Boosting the tariff to match the challenge faced opposition from the Big Four utilities that dominate Germany’s power sector: E.ON, RWE (formerly called Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk), Swedish power giant Vattenfall, and Électricité de France–owned EnBW (Energie Baden-Württemberg). Saddled with purchasing rising levels of wind power at top rates, these companies were pressing Berlin to scrap the special tariffs being offered.

It was the revival of Kohl’s center-right Christian Democratic Union party under Chancellor Angela Merkel that delivered the concessions needed to kick-start the offshore-wind industry. In 2006 Merkel’s government—a coalition that also included the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Union—made power-grid operators responsible for running cables to offshore farms. That shaved about one-fifth off the average cost of a project. And last year Merkel improved the revenue side of the ledger, boosting the offshore tariff to 0.15/kWh (US $0.21/kWh).

Slow but sure change is, well, in the wind. In a world that’s putting a price on carbon, Germany’s Big Four power giants are warming to the commercial potential of renewable energy. Over the past few years they have bought into offshore wind by acquiring projects from wind developers. Norbert Giese, director of REpower’s offshore business unit, says this shift is critical because most wind developers cannot raise the 1.2 billion (US $1.7 billion) to 1.4 billion (US $2 billion) needed to install a commercial-scale offshore farm.

Turbines have been ordered for more than 900 megawatts’ worth of installations off Germany’s northern coast. Of that, 60 MW will come from E.ON’s 180-million (US $254 million) Alpha Ventus project, a turbine cluster being installed over the next few months 45 km off the North Sea island of Borkum. E.ON will plant six of REpower’s behemoth 5-MW turbines and six more turbines of the same capacity from REpower’s competitor Multibrid in water 28 to 32 meters deep. Sven Utermöhlen, regional director and CEO for E.ON Climate and Renewables Central Europe, calls Alpha Ventus a trial to gain logistical experience with these water depths and offshore distances.