Success story

It's not so easy to get a meeting with Leukefeld. The CEO of Solifer GmbH in Freiberg, once a mining town between Chemnitz and Dresden, just gave a speech at a trade fair. Now, the 39-year-old Saxon has finished up a visit with a new client.

With energy costs on the rise, his solar-panel business is booming. "People are starting to understand that they have to count on renewable energies and sustainability," Leukefeld said.

New generation

Leukefeld, whose family was in forestry, started his 30-person company more than a decade ago, as a side venture. At the time, he was on the staff of the Technical University in Freiberg.

Leukefeld is one of a new generation of young Saxon businesspeople that emerged in the wake of the collapse of East Germany, after the difficult years of political change in the 1990s.

"I found reunification so thrilling because it showed that you can put your ideas into practice, and that hard work really pays off. In the greatest sense of the idea, that you can go from dishwasher to millionaire."

Hard road to success

But the road to success was not always easy.

"At the beginning, I had a hard time getting off the ground. No bank would give me a loan because for them, solar panels are part of the building industry, which is a real red flag," he said.

But then he got lucky. Oil prices started rising, and interest in solar heating - and the town of Freiberg - grew.

The Technical University in Freiberg is considered one of the trend-setting universities in the field of silicon research and the development of large solar energy plants.

Investment in microelectronics

In a way, the town has become exemplary of Saxony overall, considering the state has put so much energy into developing future technologies like microelectronics and biotech in addition to its traditional machine-making industries.

In the southwest of Saxony, old car and machine factories are being turned into modern industrial complexes used by companies like Volkswagen and Siemens. Saxony's solar industry has become one of the biggest in the nation, wth some 3,000 people employed.

Leukefeld is interested in more than just solar paneling. His goal is to make solar panels a key part of roofing and to develop that industry further.

Good workers are hard to find

His firm has come up with a concept for a house that uses solar energy to meet all its heating needs. Leukefeld hires students and uses PhD candidates to develop and test ideas. "We create our own next-generation of scientists that way," he said.

His employees need to have the right educational background and need to be able to speak German well. For a traineeship that was recently open, there were 50 applicants, of which "only five had the right education and it was even worse when it came to their German," he said.

He has started working together with the Association for the German Language on a course to help job seekers learn how to present themselves in good German. And he tries to see to it that his installation workers learn German, since he knows how off-putting it can be when customers are overwhelmed by technical details.

For Leukefeld, it is just one more example of the connection between culture, the economy, and sustainable development.