“Hot stuff”

Germany’s second largest city Hamburg plans to fundamentally reorganise its district heating system by using natural aquifers as year-round heat reservoirs, writes Frank Drieschner in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. “It’s about storing the summer’s heat for winter,” Drieschner writes, explaining that the salt water-bearing layers in Hamburg’s soil could practically absorb an “infinite” amount of waste heat from power plants, factories and even from the city’s Elbe River. Hamburg’s geological conditions for the aquifer heat storage are said to be “ideal”, he writes. The waste heat stored in the ground could be made available for roughly half of the price customer’s usually pay for district heating, according to figures of the ecologic think tank Hamburg-Institut, the author explains.

For information on other regional Energiewende projects, see the CLEW factsheet Local stories from Germany's energy transition.