News in Every Project

Sustainability is everywhere - but where is the climate?

Ambivalent feelings of an energy researcher: At the Institute for Energy Technology at the East Bavarian Technical University of Applied Sciences Amberg-Weiden, Professor Dr.-Ing. Markus Brautsch is primarily concerned with combined heat and power plants (CHP) and combined heat and power (CHP). The Gammel Future Energy Team (GZET) spoke to him about the future of CHP in Germany.

Doesn't that sound great? "The regulation for limiting the EEG levy to 40 percent for new CHP plants is still the subject of constructive talks between the German government and the European Commission." Doesn't that almost sound like a Christmas present, what the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy BMWI announced on 19.12.2017?

A quarter of a year ago there was a general election. Christmas is just a week away. Many had dreamed that politicians would put a new government under the Christmas tree for us voters. Everyone was disappointed. Because there has been a lot of talk in the last three months, especially on balconies, so that the cameras had something to show. But nothing has happened.

How will the transmission system operators (TSOs) manage to build their power lines across Germany until the final nuclear phase-out? We finally found out this week. At least with the "Südlink", the EU Commission is doing everything it can to ensure that the power line from Schleswig-Holstein to Bavaria is completed in a very short time.

Contaminated woodchips harm renewable energies. According to a brand-new study by renowned consultants Roland Berger from May 2017, "the heating transition is in sight". And wood energy is set to play an important role in the future. However, there are always some who think they have to use tricks to get the best out of it for themselves. But at some point it comes out. And then they damage the entire industry. This is because the public does not look at individual cases, but places the eco-heating industry, if not all renewable energies, under general suspicion.

Once upon a time. That's how all fairy tales begin. Even the one about the expansion and costs of the electricity and gas grids.

"We want to think more bottom-up, less top-down": this is what Andreas Kuhlmann writes in the introduction to the "Leitstudie Integrierte Energiewende" (Integrated Energy Transition flagship study), which is to be produced by "his" Dena, the German Energy Agency, by the end of 2018. - Well, that's why it's only an "interim summary", which was published on 20 pages recently. But the project's ambition is not entirely unambitious: "It's about more than just a simple coupling of sectors," writes the Dena boss, but about coordinating their "growing number of components and integrating them into an intelligent and sustainable energy system".

Smart, what a word. In the past, there were only smart brokers, slick bankers who pulled money out of their customers' pockets, promised them the blue sky and ran away when storm clouds appeared in the stock market sky. Then came smartphones. Although they are officially intelligent, they often deprive their owners of intelligent thoughts, making them dependent on constantly looking at the screen. And whether it is intelligent to always be available is a question that needs to be asked here.

A British-dominated company perverts Bölkow's legacy Ludwig Bölkow once had a great idea: a solar hydrogen economy was to make solar energy available to everyone in the deserts of North Africa. Generate electricity on a large scale using solar modules; split water into hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2) in electrolyzers; store the energy carrier in storage tanks and then convert it back into electricity and heat using fuel cells when and where it is needed. That was the idea.

Successful proof of research in Wildpoldsried - There you go, it works! Someone else said "I didn't know": At the end of August, Wildpoldsried in the Allgäu region was supplied with electricity from renewable energy alone in off-grid operation for the first time.

Solar eclipse in the USA as proof - "It was unbelievably beautiful, I'm on the verge of tears": This quote was the title of a dpa report on the solar eclipse (SoFi) in the USA last Monday.