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Boas are attracting a lot of attention: at carnival time the feather scarves warm the otherwise exposed women’s shoulders; but in the Rhineland brown coal district boas represent a step towards a new future in electricity and heat generation. With a “brown coal power station with optimized system technology (BoA)” towering up to 170 meters in the sky, the efficiency rate is over 43 percent, which is almost a third more than conventional plants.
With the first block brought on stream in Bergheim-Niederaußem in 2003, blocks 2 and 3, each with a capacity of 1050 MW, are currently being built in Grevenbroich-Neurath. They will replace twelve 150 MW blocks in Frimmersdorf and Neurath from the 1960‘s and will reduce the CO2 emissions by 30 percent while producing the same amount of electricity; that is equivalent to around six million tons of CO2.
Even if in 2020 30 percent of our electricity comes from renewable energies, 70 percent still has to be generated by conventional power stations. It therefore goes without saying that they will have to be much more efficient than the current models in order to reach the climate protection targets. And the Lower Rhine region is hard at work solving this problem – not just in Grevenbroich. For example, a hard coal power station with an efficiency of up to 60 percent is planned for Uerdingen Chemical Park (to replace two smaller, older power plants). The Voerde 2.1 MW power station at the Ems estuary was the first German power station to be equipped with a flue gas desulphurization plant, which was recently modernized in line with current standards.
The power stations in the Lower Rhine region and in the neighboring cities Düsseldorf and Duisberg guarantee a stable supply of base load electricity for the coming years. In particular the aluminum works nearby in Grevenbroich und Neuss will benefit from the new blocks in Neurath, for Garzweiler, the largest single brown coal open-cast mine in Europe, will be extracting brown coal at least until the middle of this century.
As such Grevenbroich will still be entitled to call itself the “federal capital of energy”. For more than 100 years the name has been associated with energy and its generation. But for a long time now this has meant more than electricity generation from brown coal. Wind turbines and a test field for wind turbine technology were installed some time ago on former mining dumps. At the moment it is the largest test field for wind energy plants inland. In 2009 the first wind power station with a hybrid tower made of concrete and steel in the world was added as a pilot project. It has a hub height of 133 meters and a total height of 180 meters. It provides an energy yield of 20 percent more than conventional turbines with a hub height of 100 meters.
Because the wind in the Lower Rhine region blows mostly from the West, the region now has many high-rise “asparagus fields” which are sometimes – like in Uedem – also called wind farms. Many companies are also profiting from this boom in wind energy generation as suppliers, such as Kempener Woodward SEG, which thanks to its excellent developments in “variable speed energy generation” is in business all round the world and is the leading technology company for the jumbo (five MW) plants.
Back to Grevenbroich. Just a few hundred meters away from the wind power test field, near Neurath, brown coal producer RWE has run a 3,500-square-meter photovoltaic array since 1991. 70 households can be supplied with electricity from this mini solar power station (360 kW); but its main purpose is to investigate the possible ways of reducing costs. In the meantime the solar power stations have become much bigger and are no longer a rarity, as you can see from the roof of Riedel Recycling in Moers (10,000 m²) or all round Mönchengladbach, where thanks to the dynamic company Intra-Solar, plenty of roof surfaces have been adorned with PV modules, including the temporary theater at Nordpark beside the Borussia stadium.
Plant oil is the fuel for a combined heat and power plant park from Hummel Energie-Systeme at Neuss port. Overall 30 power stations covering the base load are set to be brought on stream soon and supply electricity for 25,000 households or a few hundred medium-sized enterprises.
Biogas plants are no longer just used by farmers, public utilities are now signing up to this form of energy generation too. The latest plan of a company in Nettetal involves setting up a “Center for Renewable Energies” on one part of the former British air base Niederkrüchten-Elmpt with three solar power plants, six to eight wind power units, a biogas plant and a wood shavings plant.
A great deal of energy is spent on producing energy in the Lower Rhine region – and a lot of money too, for example in Neurath, which has invested 2.2 billion euros.
In good company
Contact
Bertram Gaiser
Geschäftsführer
Standort Niederrhein GmbH
02131 / 92 68 592
gaiser@standort-niederrhein.de
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