Following China and the USA, India now also wants to approve the Paris Climate Agreement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the date as 2 October. It is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. India is the world's third largest producer of greenhouse gases.
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Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft Neues Berlin and Berliner Stadtwerke have agreed on another joint tenant power project. Six solar power systems with an output of around 500 kilowatts are being built in the Mühlengrund housing estate in Hohenschönhausen. Tenants of more than 1,100 apartments will soon be able to benefit from green electricity from their own roofs.
The solar plants, which together cover 4,000 m², are being erected on a total of 23 six-storey buildings between Falkenberger Chaussee, Rüdickenstraße and Am Breiten Luch, near the Hohenschönhausen S-Bahn station. They will enable around 420,000 kilowatt hours of green electricity to be harvested per year and around 235 tonnes of the greenhouse gas CO2 save.
"We are very pleased that Neues Berlin has already started the third project with us, which is also quite large by Berlin standards," says Dr. Kerstin Busch, Managing Director of Berliner Stadtwerke, who points out that there is further potential for expansion in the Mühlengrund residential complex. "Although we are calling for improvements in the current EEG draft - for example, with regard to the obligation to tender or the supply of tenant electricity to neighbouring buildings - we see that tenant electricity can currently still succeed under certain conditions and in close communication with the residents and the cooperative, even under difficult conditions."
"Together with Berliner Stadtwerke GmbH, we have implemented environmentally friendly supply projects based on renewable energies on our roofs in a very short time and without much effort. We are looking forward to further projects like the one in Mühlengrund to give even more tenants the opportunity to benefit from tenant electricity. During the cooperation, it quickly became apparent that both sides are pursuing the goal of making an ecological and social contribution to our city with the greatest interest," says Thomas Fleck, member of the board at Neues Berlin.
In 2019, Berliner Stadtwerke and the housing cooperative Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft Neues Berlin have already successfully implemented a tenant electricity project in the residential complex Malchow floodplain in Hohenschönhausen. Since then, around 640 households have been able to obtain cheap green electricity from their own roofs. To this end, a total of five solar power systems with a total capacity of 224 kilowatts were installed on four buildings belonging to the cooperative. This year, Berliner Stadtwerke added an existing solar power system on the Neues Berlin building Degnerbogen converted to an intelligent tenant power system - a smart model for owners of PV systems that will fall out of the EEG subsidy in the future.
For Berliner Stadtwerke, the implementation of local green electricity projects is an important milestone in enabling a climate-friendly and affordable supply for all residents. To this end, solar power systems are being installed in residential areas and on public buildings, among other things, in order to generate clean electricity where it can be consumed. In addition to this local system expansion, Berliner Stadtwerke offers a range of solar energy services with its berlinStrom tariff municipal green electricity throughout the city. Today, Berlin's only public energy supplier counts more than 19,000 green electricity households among its environmentally conscious customer base.
Source: PM of Stadtwerke Berlin from 12.10.2020
Keywords:
Stock, DE-News, Climate protection, Tenant electricity, News Blog Berlin, PV, Settlements
At a hydroelectric power plant operated by the energy company Energiedienst in Grenzach-Wylen, the production of green hydrogen has been running successfully for four months. The project produces 500 kilograms of hydrogen per day.
Hydrogen from hydropower: successful start for one of the largest power-to-gas plants in Germany to date. This is reported by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW). The megawatt plant has been in operation for four months in April 2020 and is functioning reliably. A research electrolyser connected to it is also running successfully. The ZSW is coordinating the project. The operator of the commercial plant is the energy supplier Energiedienst AG.
The power-to-gas plant with an electrical connected load of one megawatt produces renewable hydrogen using electricity from the Rhine hydroelectric power plant in Wyhlen. Since it is not necessary to use the public electricity grid, grid fees and the EEG surcharge do not apply. In addition, high full load hours can be achieved because the hydropower is available practically around the clock. This further improves the economic efficiency and enables extensive operating experience to be gained quickly.
He said the plant has been running regularly since early December 2019 and has had 1,850 hours of operation since then. Previously, it was in trial operation. The monitoring system set up by the ZSW, which measures all essential components and subsystems, functions perfectly. The plant operates fully automatically in 24-hour operation both at full load and in various partial load conditions.
The ZSW monitors operation with the help of remote data transmission to Stuttgart and automated data evaluation. The overall efficiency of electricity to high-purity hydrogen compressed to 300 bar is currently up to 66 percent in relation to the calorific value of the gas. In addition, the researchers are investigating ageing effects and deriving potential improvements from the data.
So far, the plant has filled 62 trailers with hydrogen suitable for fuel cells. Each of these transportable containers holds around 300 kilograms. The plant can produce up to 500 kilograms of hydrogen per day. This is enough for an average daily mileage of more than 1,000 fuel cell cars.
The research project docked to the commercial plant is also progressing positively. In a research plant, the scientists are testing improved electrolysis blocks with a maximum output of 300 kilowatts in parallel operation with the commercial plant. They should further reduce the price of hydrogen. But companies could also test and optimize components there.
Last year, the ZSW and its research partners already achieved an initial success during the test operation of the plant: with new electrode coatings, the researchers achieved 20 percent more power density compared to the electrolysis blocks of the industrial plant section. This means that less volume and material are required for the same output.
Since the investment costs are also based on the construction volume and the electrolysis units account for the largest share of costs in the conversion of renewable electricity at around 40 percent, progress in this area is automatically reflected in the price of hydrogen. For manufacturers of electrolysis plants, development is therefore an important factor for further cost reduction. The long-term goal of the ZSW researchers and Energiedienst engineers is to roughly halve the current production costs of electricity-based hydrogen.
The state of Baden-Württemberg supports the Lighthouse project with a total of 4.5 million euros. In 2019, a project based on this was selected by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology as one of the winners of the first round of the "Reallabore der Energiewende" ideas competition. A total of twelve partners are on board for this major project.
14.4.2020 | Source: ZSW
See also:
http://sdg21.eu/blog/gruener-wasserstoff-aus-wyhlen-behoerden-geben-gruenes-licht
Keywords:
Energy storage, Research, News Blog Baden-Württemberg, Power-to-Gas, Hydrogen
Düsseldorf, 2.3.2020. The federal government can give new impetus to public housing construction in Germany in the short term and thus help to ease the acute housing shortage in many large cities. The key to this are three federally owned companies that flexibly support Länder and municipalities in the development of construction projects and the construction of new housing: First, a consulting company that provides planning capacities to cities and municipalities. Secondly, a land fund that helps municipalities nationwide financially and conceptually to acquire building land and finance infrastructure. Thirdly, an investment company that strengthens the equity of municipal housing companies through financial participation. This is shown by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Dullien, Scientific Director of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) of the Hans Böckler Foundation and Prof. Dr. Tom Krebs of the University of Mannheim in a new concept for an Federal initiative "Future Housing.*
The initiative is primarily intended to ensure that more housing is built. Other goals are: a stronger social mix in cities, the promotion of ecologically sustainable construction and a reduction in construction costs. "These goals can only be sensibly achieved by centralising certain elements of housing construction," the economists write. However, the close cooperation of the federal companies with the local administrations and housing associations would also incorporate the special expertise on the ground. The initiative could "start practically immediately with relatively small volumes", the economists write - and already achieve "a noticeable increase in public housing construction in the initial phase." According to the researchers' calculations, around 90,000 additional flats could be built in the short term with ten billion euros in federal funding. In the medium term, the model would be scalable as desired, depending on how many flats are needed in the coming years and decades.
The demand for new buildings is estimated to be at least 330,000 flats per year in Germany by 2030. However, only about 285,000 new dwellings were built per year recently. "New housing construction in Germany must therefore be further increased to meet long-term demand," the researchers write. "This should actually argue for a massive expansion of public housing promotion, but until recently the opposite was the case." This becomes particularly clear when looking at the stock of social housing: While there were still 4 million social housing units in the early 1980s, today there are only 1.2 million. Every year, about 80,000 social housing units are no longer subsidised and only about 25,000 new ones are built. "The housing shortage has negative macroeconomic consequences because people cannot realise their productivity potential," write Dullien and Krebs - for example, because they have to reduce their working hours if long journeys from the surrounding areas are necessary. "In addition, segregation and ghettoisation occur, which impairs educational opportunities."
According to Dullien and Krebs, the federal companies can solve bottlenecks that, in the view of many experts, massively hinder the necessary large-scale new construction of affordable and high-quality housing at the same time. For example, after many years of staff cuts, many municipalities have too few skilled workers in their building administrations to process applications quickly or to develop building areas. Financially weak cities and municipalities sold building land in their ownership to the highest bidder for a long time, who then often built mostly high-priced flats. Municipal housing associations remained far below their means in many cities.
The consultancy would support municipal administrations in the development of housing and district projects. Such projects are often highly complex and require the participation of many experts: engineers, urban planners, property developers, economists, cultural scientists, humanities and social scientists, geographers and landscape architects all have to work closely together. In addition, complicated financing questions have to be answered and public relations work has to be done. In many cases, the municipalities are overwhelmed by this. A company at the federal level that specialises in the development of residential neighbourhoods could make its expertise available when needed - similar to what the city of Hamburg, for example, has practised at the state level with the founding of HafenCity Hamburg GmbH. This company - a wholly owned subsidiary of the city - has taken care of the planning and management of the HafenCity district.
One of the prerequisites for a housing policy oriented towards the common good is that land remains in public hands. The land fund is intended to provide the financial means for this. Thanks to the fund's support, municipalities could afford to keep or even buy building land instead of leaving it to investors. Currently, pre-emptive rights at the municipal level are often not used because the municipalities either lack the money to purchase the land or lack the funds for public use in the near future. In addition to financial contributions, the land fund could also contribute land from federal property and organisational know-how.
The equity fund would strengthen municipal housing societies financially by increasing their equity and support municipalities or Länder in establishing public housing societies. Although many municipal housing societies have recently expanded their construction activities, some are still holding back on new construction in order not to lower their equity ratio too much. Low equity ratios lead to higher financing costs for construction loans. Increasing equity with funds from the equity fund would ease the situation for public housing societies.
According to Dullien and Krebs, the three federal companies should be legally independent entities that are wholly owned by the public sector. In addition to the usual supervisory bodies, there should also be a scientific advisory board made up of representatives of professional associations and the scientific community. The capital stock of the companies would essentially be financed by the federal government. Financing these companies through loans would be a "financial transaction" for the federal government and would therefore not fall under the rules of the debt brake. The federal corporations could also raise money through external financing.
*Sebastian Dullien, Tom Krebs (2020): Wege aus der Wohnungskrise, IMK Report No. 156, March 2020. Düsseldorf
pdf download:
www.boeckler.de/pdf/p_imk_report_156_2020.pdf
Keywords:
DE-News, Research, New books and studies, Quarters, Settlements, Housing, Housing policy
At a press conference today, Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter, together with City Planning Councillor Professor Dr. (l) Elisabeth Merk, presented an overall plan for Munich's mobility in the coming decades.
Where could new underground and tram lines be built, where could the new cycling expressways run, and where can people switch from their cars to environmentally conscious means of transport? The mobility of tomorrow will be characterised by an optimal interlocking of different forms of mobility - first and foremost an optimised and broadly developed public transport system, a wide network of cycle paths, new offers for commuters in so-called HOV lanes ("High-occupancy vehicle lanes"), dedicated bus lanes and clever mobility concepts in settlement development with innovative means of transport.
Not only population and economic growth pose major challenges for transport infrastructure and settlement development, but at the same time the urban goals for traffic safety ("Vision Zero"), the political and legal requirements for environmental and climate protection (air pollution control, CO2 neutrality) and technological progress (digitalisation and networking) must always be taken into account.
Mayor Dieter Reiter: "Only with a well-developed and, above all, cleverly networked mobility will we be able to master the great challenges. The overall concept published today contains many good ideas for the further expansion of our transport infrastructure. The backbone is, of course, local public transport, which we not only want to greatly expand, but also create further tangential and ring connections in its network. I see this look into the future as a good basis and impulse for further debates. However, the mobility of the future can only be successfully developed in cooperation with the Munich region. In recent years, the city council has passed several groundbreaking resolutions for well-connected, environmentally friendly and space-saving mobility. We want to continue this".
City Planning Councillor Professor Dr. (l) Elisabeth Merk. "In the overall concept, we want to bundle all important measures for sustainable transport planning. It is important to us that we tackle it together. In dialogue with citizens and stakeholders from the region".
Expansion of local public transport (ÖPNV)
Public transport is the backbone of sustainable mobility. To encourage even more people to switch from their cars to public transport, the service will be significantly improved - through the new main station, the second main line, new bus lanes, underground and tram lines, increased frequency, more reliability and comfort. The existing network will be decentralised by tangents and, where sensible, supplemented by innovative means of transport such as cable cars or on-demand services. The result is less congestion and freed-up space that can be used, for example, for lanes for express buses, cycle paths or as amenity spaces.
Improving the cycling infrastructure
Cycling in the city is becoming much safer and more attractive. The continuous and safe "Altstadt-Radlring" (Old Town Cycle Ring) demanded by the citizens' petition is being implemented step by step; every quarter, the city council also decides on a bundle of further measures to make the road network significantly more cycle-friendly. This means that the demands of the second citizens' petition "Radentscheid" will be largely realised by 2025. Munich's first cycle path from the Stachus in the direction of Garching and Unterschleißheim as well as five further star-shaped routes will connect the city centre with the surrounding area; a cycle ring connects several city districts.
New offers for the city-countryside commuter traffic
Work-related commuting between the city and the region is made easier: modern Park & Ride facilities are being built on the motorways and main access roads at the gates of the city. From there, express buses continue on to the city centre on separate lanes without traffic jams and loss of time. The occupancy rate of commuting cars is increased by allowing the bus lanes to be shared by vehicles with several occupants. These "high-occupancy vehicle lanes" are already successfully helping to reduce car traffic abroad. For the "first" and "last mile" to and from public transport stops, more sharing and on-demand services will be provided, for example call buses.
Car-reduced city centre
New parking regulations, fewer parking spaces, traffic-calmed zones and sustainable logistics concepts will reduce car traffic in the old town and city centre. The space thus freed up will benefit cycling, walking and public transport as well as the quality of stay and the green and open spaces that are so important for the urban climate. Necessary, unavoidable car journeys into the city centre will still be possible. However, it is primarily emission-free, innovative means of transport that will shape mobility here. Efficient city logistics concepts make delivery and loading traffic compatible.
Mobility concepts
When planning new neighbourhoods and urban renewal projects, mobility concepts are considered from the very beginning. The focus is on a lively, balanced structure of uses in which as many everyday needs as possible can be found in the immediate residential environment. Short distances, good internal and external access to the neighbourhood by public transport, car and bike sharing services enable people to live without their own cars and increase the quality of life.
Innovative means of transport
Mobility is strongly influenced by digitalisation and innovations. The City of Munich takes these up, plans ahead and is open to trends. Automated and connected driving is currently being researched together with partners from business, science and research; a cable car over the Frankfurter Ring is being studied for the north of Munich, which has heavy traffic. With all new technologies, the focus is on user needs.
On Wednesday, 12 February, the City Council will deal with other important resolutions on mobility in Munich in the Committee for Urban Planning and Building Regulations in addition to the draft resolution "Mobility Plan for Munich".
Source: PM of the City of Munich from 31.1.2020
Keywords:
Bike-/Velo-City, CarSharing, DE-News, Communities, Mobility, New books and studies, News Blog Bavaria, Environmental policy, eMobility
