The number of car sharing users in Germany rose sharply again in 2016. On 1 January 2017, a good 1.7 million customers were registered with German car sharing providers. This is 36 per cent more than in the previous year. The German government now wants to promote the further expansion of the service through a car sharing law.
You can read all the information on this at:
www.carsharing.de/mehr-17-millionen-carsharing-nutzer-deutschland
In an article also published today, WiWo Green discusses whether Car2go, Drive Now & Co. actually benefit the environment.
Getting rid of your car and sharing one with others - that's the basic idea behind car sharing. The idea is to reduce the burden on the environment and traffic. But experts think so: In the meantime, the opposite is happening.
Berlin, 22 October 2018: Vattenfall Energy Solutions, Gewobag and the energy storage start-up Lumenion are jointly piloting a new type of sector-coupled steel storage system at Bottroper Weg in Berlin-Tegel, which absorbs regional generation peaks from wind and solar energy in a grid-serving manner and later provides the renewable energy as heat and electricity in line with demand.
"With this pilot project, we want to demonstrate the particular technical and economic suitability of thermal storage systems for the effective utilisation of large quantities of wind and solar energy in a very practical way," says Alexander Voigt, founder and Managing Director of Lumenion. "Some of our team have been working with renewable energies for over 30 years and with energy storage systems for over ten years. Based on this experience, we made a conscious decision in favour of steel as a storage medium for the second phase of the energy transition, which is just beginning."
The Lumenion steel storage system stores "electricity peaks" for less than 2 cent/KWh in a cost- and space-efficient manner at up to 650° Celsius as heat, which can be converted back into electricity using a turbine unit if required - or used entirely as heat. As a co-founder of Solon, Q-Cells and Younicos, among others, Voigt has been successfully launching solar modules and storage systems on the market since the 1990s.
Hanno Balzer, Managing Director of Vattenfall Energy Solutions GmbH: "Decentralised systems and energy storage are key factors in the energy transition; heat is a particularly cost-effective form of storage. If the stored energy can then be utilised not only as heat but also in the form of electricity, that is a milestone. The high-temperature storage system brings us a big step closer to this!"
Karsten Mitzinger from Gewobag Energie- und Dienstleistungsgesellschaft adds: "The energy transition can only succeed if it is decentralised and based on partnership. As a housing industry, we are making our contribution to climate protection in our neighbourhoods. With this project, we are pleased to be able to demonstrate the good cooperation between energy supply companies, municipal housing associations and innovative start-ups. Only together can we master the major challenges of the energy transition."
In the Tegler pilot project, a 2.4 megawatt hour (MWh) storage block is being trialled for commercial use and transferred to regular operation. To this end, the unit will be integrated with an existing gas-powered CHP unit from Vattenfall Energy Solutions into the neighbourhood electricity and local heating supply of a 1970s apartment building owned by Gewobag. The storage system will temporarily absorb any power peaks that are not required and feed them into the heat supply later on as needed. In a second step, a reconversion into electricity is also planned.
Parallel to the construction of the pilot project, Lumenion is testing a 450 kWh prototype on the campus of the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in Oberschöneweide. The HTW is supporting Lumenion with practical accompanying research in the development, testing and validation of data, as well as in the regulation and operational management of the innovative storage system.
In further projects, Lumenion storage systems with 40 MWh and even 1,400 MWh are to be created as the next milestones. These giga-storages can integrate existing and newly added large quantities of renewable electricity generation from wind and solar power into the existing grids in a particularly favourable, efficient and demand-oriented manner, thus enabling a significant acceleration of the energy transition.
The illumination of night landscapes by artificial lighting increases globally by about 2 to 6 percent per year, with effects on people and nature. A new guide describes how municipalities can minimize light pollution by making their street and building lighting more efficient. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) and the University of Münster have now jointly published the guide on redesigning and retrofitting outdoor lighting.
About 30 percent of vertebrates and even more than 60 percent of invertebrates are nocturnal and can be affected by artificial light at night. The protection of the night must therefore be understood more strongly than before as a fundamental task of nature and landscape conservation, says Prof. Dr. Beate Jessel, President of BfN. The guide to action now published shows that it is possible to minimise the ecological damage caused by artificial lighting. It contains numerous concrete recommendations for action and practical tips for outdoor lighting.
Good lighting is efficient and reduces power consumption while increasing visibility and safety. It is aesthetically pleasing and minimises environmental impact. Many of the measures presented in the action guide are also simple and inexpensive to implement, is how IGB researcher and study leader Dr. Franz Hölker sums up the requirements. Franz Hölker's team is a leader in Germany and internationally in research into so-called light pollution. This is the term used when artificial light at night has a negative impact on humans and light-sensitive creatures. The guide is largely based on scientific findings that his working group, together with researchers from the BfN and the University of Münster, have gained over many years of work.
In the absence of explicit regulations for outdoor lighting, industrial standards for lighting are often treated in practice as legal provisions. In many cases, even the minimum requirements of the technical standards are far exceeded in order to exclude possible claims for damages, for example in the event of traffic accidents, and to prevent accusations that the street lighting does not comply with the state of the art. The result is that outdoor areas are often illuminated much more than necessary, with possible negative consequences for people and nature. However, it is possible to minimise the ecological impact of artificial lighting and at the same time meet social requirements such as safety and aesthetics.
The first author, Dr. Sibylle Schroer from the IGB, gives examples of solutions: Municipalities should use luminaires that do not emit light upwards. The illuminance should be as low as possible and cold white light with a high blue light content should be avoided. This is because the circadian system of higher vertebrates and humans is particularly sensitive to blue light. The use of warm white light can mitigate the negative effects on many organisms and is often perceived as more pleasant by humans.
The interdisciplinary collaboration with the lawyer for environmental and planning law, Benedikt Huggins from the University of Münster, uncovered gaps in environmental law in order to better protect organisms from exposure to poorly installed, unnecessary or excessively bright artificial light in the future. The recommendations were made on the basis of the two research and development projects Analysis of the effects of artificial light on biodiversity, Determination of indicators of impairment and derivation of recommendations for action to avoid negative effects in the context of interventions and Light and glass: Legal issues of the endangerment of species by light and glass, funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment and accompanied in terms of content by the BfN.
The restriction of light pollution brings further advantages, for example in terms of energy savings and thus climate protection, as well as for human health. The guide offers those responsible in local authorities as well as those responsible for lighting, urban and regional planning a free professional decision-making aid to actively promote the conscious use of artificial light.
On 15 March, the Mayors' Dialogue "Sustainable City" developed impulses for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in German municipalities. The mayors focused on the contributions of municipalities to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11 "Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable".
The mayors of Augsburg, Bonn, Bottrop, Darmstadt, Delitzsch, Düsseldorf, Erfurt, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Friedrichshafen, Hanover, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Kassel, Constance, Leipzig, Lörrach, Ludwigsburg, Lüneburg, Munich, Münster, Norderstedt, Nuremberg, Osnabrück, Ravensburg, Rheine, Tübingen and Wernigerode have signed the statement so far.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, around one in two (50.6 percent) of the 18,334 residential buildings (excluding dormitories) approved in 2019 are to be heated predominantly or exclusively with renewable energies.
Düsseldorf (IT.NRW). In North Rhine-Westphalia, around one in two (50.6 per cent) of the 18 334 residential buildings approved in 2019 (excluding dormitories) will be heated predominantly or exclusively with renewable energies. These 9 283 residential buildings use biomass, biogas/biomethane, wood, solar panels and/or heat pumps as primary heating energy. As reported by Information und Technik Nordrhein-Westfalen as the State Statistical Office on the occasion of this year's Renewable Energy Day (25 April 2020), the share of construction projects using environmentally friendly heating energies was highest statewide in the Olpe district last year: there, builders relied on renewable energies in 82.2 percent of new buildings. Bottrop (81.3 percent) and the district of Kleve (73.8 percent) followed in second and third place. Building owners in Solingen and the district of Mettmann, on the other hand, planned to use conventional heating energy in the majority of cases in 2019: Here, renewable energies were the primary heating source in around one in five and one in four residential building projects respectively (Solingen: 22.7 per cent; Mettmann district: 26.7 per cent). (IT.NRW)
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