Saying goodbye to the fossil fart - Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Timo Leukefeld
What the energy transition in Germany needs is an attractive Chinese woman. Excuse me? The audience looks at Timo Leukefeld questioningly. The smart Saxon energy guru, who is causing a stir nationwide, unveils his visions at the Stammelbach event center in Hildesheimer Börde, invited by Volksbank. He starts explaining his thesis by mentioning that neuroscience has found that even a 90-year-old can learn Chinese, but not at the adult education center. This only works if he is in love with a younger Chinese woman. She serves as a symbol of enthusiasm for him on this evening. According to Leukefeld, enthusiasm for the energy transition is not heading in the right direction. "I don't see the attractive Chinese woman in that," says the 47-year-old. For the professor from Freiberg, the energy transition rather means: continuous political mistakes and senseless funding programs that hinder rather than promote progress. And: Everything revolves around electricity, essentially the energy transition is an electricity transition. "Heat is not politically sexy," laments the prominent speaker, even though it is a sleeping giant. In an average single-family house, heat accounts for 87 percent of the energy consumed. Leukefeld has built a house for his own family that is anything but average: the first house in the country that draws all the energy needs of the residents autonomously from the sun. Solar thermal provides warmth, photovoltaics provide electricity. The secret lies in the sophisticated storage systems. Lead batteries even feed the electric car parked outside. The Federal Minister for the Environment and the Prime Minister attended the topping-out ceremony. He was like the Saxon king, Leukefeld had explained to his then six-year-old son. The result: "Where is your crown?" the son crowed at the Saxon Minister President Stanislaw Tillich. In the meantime, Leukefeld has become a kind of pope of energy self-sufficiency. The guests of the Börde Bank suspect: Leukefeld's visions are probably feasible, not detached, but rooted in reality. Enthusiasm spreads from the stage. Oil is out, lectures the guru. Burning it was a fossil fart in our history," he says, now it's time to air out and move on. "Humanity is entering a new solar age. The more energy comes from the sun, the more relaxed people can lean back. If the teenager leaves the light on for hours in an empty room again, the family father no longer has to worry. Even the dogma of insulation gets scratches. Leukefeld thus places his lecture that evening under the motto "Intelligently wasting energy." However, everything has two sides - saving energy also gains a whole new meaning for retirement planning, explains the Saxon. If the pension shrinks, only one thing helps: spending less. And according to Leukefeld, energy self-sufficiency offers many opportunities in saying goodbye to the fossil fart. Not only for homeowners - he has already developed concepts for multi-family houses as well, integrating heat and electricity from the sun into the rent as a flat rate over a period of ten years. The audience in Hildesheim was visibly impressed by the guru. They also take practical tips home, for example, connecting the dishwasher to the hot water network. The fact that the devices heat their water themselves is just one of the many energetic everyday phenomena that amuse the energy expert: “That is the height of stupidity.”
