Case Studies

In the typical Belgian winter fog, Esmeralda Peleman, CEO of Peleman Industries, looks with satisfaction at the on-site 2 MWh battery storage system against whose backdrop two windturbines are turning leisurely. “We have been using the storage system to increase our self-consumption for almost five years, but the last 18 months have been crazy”, she comments.

The site of the geothermal plant near Garching an der Alz flashes and shines even through the early morning fog of the Bavarian plain. Everything is brand new, because the plant has only been feeding its electricity into the public grid since March 2021. As one of around a dozen megawatt-class geothermal power plants in Germany, the project is regarded as a pioneering example of energy generation from geothermal resources. The production well with a depth of almost 4,000 meters enables the extraction of 125 l/s of thermal water with a temperature of 123 degrees Celsius. These impressive numbers constitute the basis for the subsequent electricity and heat generation process. 

When you turn onto the Petersen farm in North Friesland, you enter an energy transition wonderland. Behind you, dozens of wind turbines are turning, on the left a fully electric fleet of vehicles from the local project developer GP JOULE is charging, and straight ahead a biogas plant is humming. "And behind the shed is Germany's first brownfield solar park in the megawatt class," laughs Sören Sönksen as he welcomes you. He takes care of the commercial aspects of the biogas plant - and thus also the sale of electricity. 

"Participation is important in the energy transition," explains Peter Ramharter, Managing Director of WICON Engineering GmbH, pointing from the nacelle of the wind turbine in Lichtenegg to the surrounding settlements in the Land of a Thousand Hills, as the area south of Wiener Neustadt likes to be called.

OBO Bettermann's head office is located on the southern edge of the Ruhr area, the symbol of an age characterized by coal and steel. The company has been based in the city of Menden for more than 100 years and is what is commonly known as a hidden champion. OBO is now represented at more than 60 locations worldwide and produces cable trays and ducts for a wide range of applications in commercial and industrial installations.

Louis Vial is a busy entrepreneur who is always on the lookout for new business ideas. Thus, he does not only operate his own building company, but is also owner of the “Pousse Pousse” start-up, with which participants with a monthly subscription get inspiration for Do-It-Yourself projects. Now the businessman from Perpignan is also operator of his own solar park. Or to be more precise: Operator of a roofed parking lot on whose roof the 1.9 MWp PV rooftop system is mounted.

In Haßfurt, a small town in the middle of Mainfranken, a Bavarian region in Southern Germany on a clear, windy May day around 2 pm: The electrolyzer starts booming and hydrogen is being produced from wind power. The gas tank behind the hall fills up. Norbert Zösch, Managing Director of the local utility Stadtwerk Haßfurt, smiles: "On a day like this, we can produce gas very cheaply thanks to excess renewables". Then he opens the roller shutter of the tidy, rather inconspicuous hall on the outskirts of the town, filled with power lines, pipes and electronics.

A small, winding road leads from Ludwigshafen at Lake Constance through a dense deciduous forest to Sipplinger Berg. Its plateau, with a wide view over the Swabian Sea to the Alps, is covered by the huge and yet almost invisibly embedded treatment plant of the Zweckverband Bodensee Wasserversorgung, the largest regional watter supplier. Together with the Süßenmühle lake pumping station, which pumps raw water from Lake Constance 310 meters below up to the mountain top, the plant is the largest waterworks in Germany.

"Biogas has to move from a flat feed-in pattern towards flexibility, in order to be future-proof and to advance the energy transition!” Fortunately, this sentence is now often heard in Berlin's energy policy circles, in industry associations and sometimes even on television. But Gerd Clasen from KBB Biogas GmbH & Co KG is not sitting in Berlin and not in front of a camera when he says this sentence. Gerd Clasen sits in the control room of a biogas plant in Kirchlinteln, in Lower Saxony. He is implementing what the others are talking about.

Sometimes it's the small screws you have to turn to change the big picture. This is also the case with the two wood-fired power stations of Holzwerke Weinzierl GmbH. Initially, as producers of electricity from renewable energies, they fired the energy transition with an output of over four megawatts. In the meantime, the power plants today also act as participants on the balancing energy market and compensate for grid frequency fluctuations within seconds.