Jühnde’s biomass power plant runs 24/7 and gets fed manure and grains every day. (Photo by Sadie Babits)
People fed up with hearing
about an energy crisis talk
about going off the grid.
In the US, the solution is
to install solar panels on
your roof or put up a wind
turbine. But a village in
Germany has taken a different
approach. In the final part
of our three-part series on
biofuels in Europe, Sadie
Babits explains:
Transcript
People fed up with hearing
about an energy crisis talk
about going off the grid.
In the US, the solution is
to install solar panels on
your roof or put up a wind
turbine. But a village in
Germany has taken a different
approach. In the final part
of our three-part series on
biofuels in Europe, Sadie
Babits explains:
The village of Juhnde sits between rolling farmland and woods. The first buildings went up more than a thousand years ago. It looks like a lot of German villages – narrow streets, terra cotta roofs, and a towering church steeple. But talk to anyone here and they’ll tell you Juhnde is no ordinary town. It’s the first community in Germany to be powered and heated by cow manure and grain.
“This is the biogas power station on this side.“
That’s Gerd Paffenholz. He’s lived here in Juhnde for 20 years. He volunteers to show visitors, like me, the village’s bio-energy plant.
“This is the wood heating system and what you don’t see is the network that deliver the hot water in the ground.”
Paffenholz stands on top of an underground storage tank. The liquid manure in here gets pumped over to a massive green tank. That’s the anerobic digester. There, micro-organisms have a hay day eating manure and grains supplied by farmers in Juhnde. The bacteria create biogas, which then gets combusted into heat and electricity. It’s pretty silent outside the power station but open the door…
(engine sound)
That’s the sound of 700 kilowatts of power being generated. The electricity gets sent to the public network. It provides this village of 750 people with renewable power. There’s an added bonus – energy that’s normally lost while making biogas gets captured and is used to heat water. That hot water gets delivered through a series of underground pipes to heat most of the homes in Juhnde.
The village’s bioenergy plant went live five years ago. The price tag? Nearly 8 million dollars. The money came through a government grant and from residents who each ponied up thousands of dollars to join the plant cooperative. The village has also cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half already meeting targets set by the European Union for 2050.
“It shows you what some wise investments and collective thinking can make happen.”
That’s Jim McMillan. He researches biofuels at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. He says Juhnde has created an attractive model that could work in the Northern US and Canada where people are more remote and winters are long and hard.
“It’s a good model but Europe, I mean, they’re built out much more than we are and they are doing a lot more in building. They’re density of building, the size of their square foot of their homes are much more right size and so these solutions are easier to implement there than they are here I mean we have a lot more big homes that require a lot more heat.”
Our attitudes are different too. It took several years to get Juhnde’s residents to buy into the idea of going off the grid but now most everyone is on board. Here in the U.S. we’re a lot more individualistic. But McMillan still sees a lot of promise in what Juhnde accomplished.
“So one village is a good example but we need to apply it across the board.”
Other villages in Germany are building bio energy plants. In the U.S. a few towns are attempting parts of Juhnde’s efforts. Reynolds, Indiana replaced the town’s vehicle fleet with cars and trucks that run on bio fuel. It’s now working with a company to turn algae into power. And in Grand Marais, Minnesota, they want to build a central heating system for the town that burns wood chips from the local saw mill.
For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.
