Not only the movement “Fridays for Future” has many supporters at the moment, also the “Windretter” have a lot of supporters behind them. On 10 April 2019, the initiator Sybille Riepe handed over an open letter with 4,105 signatures to the Minister of Economics of Schleswig-Holstein, Dr. Bernd Klaus Buchholz.

Representatives from 36 companies and associations that had joined forces to form this energy storage campaign at the end of 2018 had appeared at the Berlin regional council of the energy-rich northern federal state in order to express their demand for an intelligent regulation for the economic use of renewable electricity.

In his statement, the minister expressly thanked Sybille Riepe, the managing director of the agency motum GmbH, and explained that he was entirely on her side. He said: “Regulations that may have been well thought out years ago need to be changed. […] We’re not the madmen from the north, we’re the thought leaders. We can be pioneers – in Schleswig-Holstein and in Germany.”

Dr. Martin Grundmann, “Windretter” supporter and managing director of ARGE Netz GmbH & Co. KG, expressly praised this “initiative of a citizen”. Turning to politicians, however, he criticised the fact that this legislative period was now the third in which it would not go any further. Together with major partners such as Vattenfall and MAN, his company wants to invest around 100 million euros in Brunsbüttel as part of the HySynGas project, but is being held back by the current legal situation. He also referred to AdBlue^® producer Yara, Europe’s fifth-largest energy consumer, which also wants to enter the hydrogen business on a large scale, but is still waiting for the lack of planning security.

The wind rescuers want to create a greater awareness that the available resources of renewable energies are frivolously wasted and often remain unused, although there is an ever-increasing demand for energy, especially in stored form. In the next step, in the presence of Dr. Buchholz, the signatures of the supporters are to be passed on to Federal Economics Minister Peter Altmaier in order to give even more emphasis to their concerns.