Topics of the Day

• Energy and Water
• Opencast Mining in Berlin and Brandenburg
• Resistance to Opencast Mining

ENERGY AND WATER: POTENTIALS AND RISKS
Energy and Water
In the morning the theme of “Water usage in energy producing technologies” was implied by team participant from Romania. The principles of various energy production technologies were presented and used as an opportunity to get familiar with the different practices implemented. The production technologies can be summed up in Thermoelectric, Hydroelectric, Open-Cast Mining, Fracking.
Thermoelectric principles divided in recirculating cooling and one-through cooling, while Hydroelectric principles consist of Dams and Run-of-the-river.
The procedure of familiarizing with the principles was realized through team games in the form of exercises. The exercises have created and interesting point between the presentation parts.

EXERCISE 1
What percentage of water is evaporated in dams?
What percentage of water gets recovered from fracking?
Without calculating give a relative answer.

Renewable Energy
The forms of renewable energy are altogether Solar, Wind, Hydroelectrical, Tidal, Geothermal, Biomass, Renewable Waste. Statistics were presented to give an idea about the use percentages. Then two group games were implemented two familiarize the participants with renewable energy uses in daily life.

EXERCISE 2
Collective living
Choose a type of building (private or public) with permanent or temporary residents and Imagine methods for using less water while functioning on the same parameters.

Some really interesting ideas occurred, most of them on the same path of sustainability, ecology, educational methods and new technologies implemented. Examples of these were: waterless hygiene facilities, faucet redactor, permeable paving, rope garden, roof garden, use of recycled paper, special informative events.

EXERCISE 3
Banning energy production technologies that use unsustainable quantities of water & start the transition to technologies that use reduced amounts of water. Formulate 4 objectives that answer your goals & can be transformed in a draft bill (1).

In this exercise we didn’t get the point well and focused in a different scale than requested. The idea would be to have a mission (1) and form objectives that would later be followed by actions. We focused more on the actions than the objectives. That helped us in the end discuss the whole procedure of organizing a goal and was more productive in idea-making.

Opencast Mining in Berlin and Brandenburg
Daniella Setton, a political scientist and activist presented the issue. At the beginning the group presented ourselves and a our personal interest in the specific issue. This helped organize the discussion later.
LIGNITE (brown coal)
The lignite (brown coal) is still 25,6% of energy production of Germany, while renewable energy reaches for the first time in 2014 a higher percentage of 25,8%. The Germany is the first lignite production country in the world. At the same time lignite is the dirtiest production with the most CO2 emissions. The 9 biggest lignite power plants og Germany cover 20% of worldwide lignite energy production.
WATER & MINING
Many people, even protected minorities will be forced to relocate due to new power plants being planned in Germany in the following years.
The extensive lowering of groundwater table is one of the main needs of open-cast mining, because the excavation for lignite is very deep. In order for this excavation to be stable, large quantities of water have to be pumped away and 140 lakes (inactive open pits) have to be filled with water.
PROBLEMS
The problems that occur can be summarized:
• Trees dry out
• Soil gets very wet after the stop of excavations and becomes unstable
• Acids & deficits of water (1/2 of lake pits from a number of 5000 has a PH<3)
• Noise
• High Iron and Sulfate concentration
IRON
As the ecosystem is dying slowly, there will be a possibility of having no food and no fish if the iron issues remain unsolved. Also being said that the flow velocity is around 10cm\s, especially on the banks, so it will be carried along again. Spreewald is a UNESCO biosphere that gives more than 7000 jobs from tourism in the area, and measures taken until now were not efficient enough.
SULFATE
Drinking water with high level of sulfate it is a problem of more than 2 million people in Germany. Around 70% of this drinking water comes from the Spree surface, that is where the concentration of sulfate arises. This is one of the actions “Friends of Earth” is carrying out in order to raise awareness on this problem. Still, the legislation for open-mining in Germany comes from the 3rd Reich era.

Resistance to Opencast Mining
The speaker referred to this topic as one of the most successful actions. The protest went on the social media and online petitions, but the collection of signatures was a mandatory step in order to go ahead with the resistance. The motto was “Kein weiteres Dorf abbaggern”
More than 110.000 signatures were gathered, about 70.000 from Greenpeace. The pro-movement was unsuccessful, getting almost half of the signatures only.
The next step will be a demonstration in the 25.04.2015, “Anti-Kohl-Kette”.
After dinner we watched a documentary regarding the life in the ocean, and how the massive fishing is destroying the ecosystem and difficulting the natural process, with some restraints and future problems.
After the movie, we discussed the topic along the remaining participants. It was a intensive day but we really appreciated input!