To a large extent, Stadtwerke München’s pioneering role in renewables is a result of local politics.

While other large German cities sold their municipal public utilities to outside energy companies to make a quick buck and pay off debt, Munich loyally stuck to SWM and beefed it up.

Much of that is down to the influence of the Green Party as a coalition partner in city governments from 1990-2014 (together with the centre-left Social Democrats [SPD] and a small local gay party, Pink List).

When the red-green-pink alliance lost its majority in 2014, it tried to pull a smaller green party, the Ecological Democrats (ÖDP) into its coalition. Ironically, that attempt failed as the ÖDP insisted on an even faster exit from coal-based heat and power generation (by 2022 instead of 2029) than already planned.

As the biggest party back then, the SPD went shopping for another spouse and found it in the form of its arch-rival, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) that has governed the state of Bavaria for decades.

Despite the CSU’s opposition to wind farms in Bavaria and high-voltage lines to transport renewable energy from northern to southern Germany, the SPD-CSU alliance has kept SWM’s renewables ambitions intact.

This may be, at least partly, due to the growing popularity of the Greens. In state elections last autumn, the Greens overtook the SPD and became Bavaria’s second-largest party behind the CSU, garnering 17.6% of the vote, a sensation in the hitherto staunchly conservative state.

In Munich, the Greens did even better, gaining 31.1% of the vote in the city. That could augur well for municipal elections next year, and for the first time put the Greens at the helm of a European metropolis with more than a million inhabitants.

SWM: Germany's green power champion in Lederhosen