German towns launch trial to kick coal and gas from energy supply
Three Western German towns are launching a trial to run the
local energy supply without coal and gas, reports the newswire dpa in an
article carried by the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Energy company E.ON plans to digitally connect
neighbourhoods in Essen, Bedburg and Kaisersesch by 2024 to balance supply and
demand. Sixty million euros will be invested in the project dubbed
“SmartQuart.”
Different forms of energy supply are being tested in the
project. Two neighbourhoods will experiment with local power generation using
wind and solar power as well as a central storage unit, while another will run
a trial using green hydrogen produced on-site.
“The aim of the project is to make the use of fossil fuels
in the project neighbourhoods largely superfluous” and to turn the
neighbourhoods into energy transition players “as flexible parts of a future
energy system,” E.ON said in a press release.
“An important factor here is the decentralised sector
coupling at local level in the neighbourhoods in order to implement the energy
transition in the areas of mobility, heat and electricity.”
Andreas Feicht, state secretary at the federal energy and
economy ministry, called the project “the energy transition on a neighborhood
scale” that takes into account the various interests of citizens, local
authorities, planners, plant and network operators. State economy minister
Andreas Pinkwart said the project will provide “initial findings for
broad-based implementation in his state of North Rhine-Westphalia.”
Germany’s energy transition is a vast national project that
is reshaping the entire country. But, of course, it is also taking place on a
local level. With the shift to a decentralised energy system, renewable power
has been increasingly generated in, and often owned by, local communities.
Urban centres are where much of the country’s energy is
distributed and consumed. And as the energy transition expands its focus from
the power sector to heating, buildings and mobility, population centres will be
where crucial changes take place.
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