Schönau im Schwarzwald
municipality in Germany
Schönau im Schwarzwald (German pronunciation: [ˈʃøːnaʊ ʔɪm ˈʃvaʁtsvalt], lit. 'Schönau in the Black Forest') is a town in the district of Lörrach in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated in the Black Forest, on the river Wiese, 35 kilometres (22 mi) northeast of Basel, Switzerland, and 23 kilometres (14 mi) south of Freiburg.
Energy infrastructure
After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, a small group led by Michael and Ursula Sladek founded the Parents for a Nuclear Free Future group, to research how they could limit the community's dependence on nuclear power. Their first approach was on saving energy and getting others to save energy. They reactivated small hydropower plants in the region. The couple developed the idea of a power system independent of nuclear power plants, generating electric power through distributed mini power plants from renewable sources. After ten years of campaigning and raising awareness, they founded the first German green power utility, the Elektrizitätswerke Schönau (EWS), in 1994. They took over providing power for the community in 1997. With a system that combined efficiency and power-saving strategies, it became possible to satisfy the power consumption of the community. Schönau was the first community in a Western country that became independent of the national power grid and could decide how its power would be produced.
“Schönau im Schwarzwald” enters the record as municipality in Germany. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Schönau, Schwarzwald and municipality can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q61731. VIAF identifies the subject as 236984832. Authority coordinates are 47.787, 7.894. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1994 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Schönau im Schwarzwald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.