ABSTRACT
Today’s Austria is, by size and population number, somewhere in the middle of the 27 member states of the European Union and, by per capita income and economic development, in the front. About 40% of the Alps are in Austria and about 60% of Austria belongs to the Alpine region. There is no coast in Austria, but a strong tourism sector with great impact on landscape and nature protection.Power utilities in the Alpine regions earn lots of money from hydro storage, outside from hydro run-off facilities, some utilities have both. Out of that system Austria is able to produce about 70% of the domestically needed electricity from hydro in a sustainable way. Because of the exchange of great amounts of cheap overflow power for pump storage from the neighbour countries for small amounts of expensive peak load power, the Austrian utilities are not targeting the maximum use of hydro power for
Austrian needs. So the share decreased to about 60% hydro in Austria’s power balance in recent years. Beside the influential hydro sector, Austria has a dominant oil and gas company, which is a powerful upstream and downstream player in Europe. Austria’s domestic oil and gas production is small and coal mining has already come to an end. In 1970s the responsible energy managers and politicians promoted nuclear as the future energy supply until that was stopped by public vote on 5 November 1978. In the years following this unexpected and catastrophic decision, as it was experienced by the mainstream energy people (the Nuclear Power Plant Zwentendorf was ready to be started), Austria became a hot spot in renewable energy grass root developments. Austria became a leading country in biomass and solar thermal technologies. Wind power and photovoltaics
did not have a take-off in these years.
