Energiewende – an Herculean task

Kennedy and the moon landing

The Apollo project cost 25 billion dollars. In the mid-60s, the USA’s gross domestic product (GDP) was around 1000 billion dollars. So the costs of the project amounted to around 2.5 % of GDP annually over a 10-year period.

The costs of transforming our energy system our 1000 TWh project – will amount to around 1% of Germany’s GDP over a 30-year period.

Viewed in relative terms, then, our project is four times larger and must be sustained over a period three times longer. That’s the economic scale of the Hercules project: larger than Apollo, but certainly not »astronomical«.