Agriculture

Published on October 2nd, 2014 | by Zachary Shahan

The Only Grid-Independent Village In The World?

October 2nd, 2014 by Zachary Shahan

A little village in Germany, Feldheim, claims to be the only 100% grid-independent village in the world. It is a rural community that switched to renewables for financial reasons, but is now visited by thousands and thousands of people. The tour guide who showed us around noted that his most interesting group was when he had government officials from North Korea on one side of the tables and members of the US Republican Party on the other side*.

The Only Energy-Independent Village in Germany

The German village of Feldheim claims to be the first and only energy-independent village in the world. I’m quite positive there are villages in the developing world that are completely energy independent, so I’ll just take that to mean that it is the first energy-independent village in the developed world… (unless there are actually some energy-independent ecovillages out there).

Anyhow, the is definitely the first energy-independent village in Germany, and one of the first in the modern world. The village does not use coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy in any way.

Note, however, that this does not included transportation, as villagers do use conventional gasoline-powered vehicles. The marketing is really a bit loose with the term “energy” when it actually means “electricity and heat.”

Other than for transportation purposes, though, the only things this village uses for energy are what nature provides to it within 5-7 kilometers. The village has its own microgrid and does not take electricity from the German grid at all.

Wind Led the Way

Everything started in 1995 when a student traveled around Brandenburg with a wind map and eventually found a mayor in this area who was interested in having a wind farm installed.

Four wind turbines were initially installed in 1995. Now, there are 47 with a total capacity of 91 MW. The wind farm is externally owned, but it provides most of Feldheim’s electricity. The wind turbines produce electricity 90% of the time. (It’s very windy there!)

The wind farm, built by an external developer, also sends electricity to the German grid.

Our tour guide, who was not a villager but one of 5 voluntary tour guides, noted to us that trust has been an essential component of this village’s renewable energy development, trust between the villagers and the wind farm developer as well as trust between the members of the village.

From Wind to Biogas

Aside from the wind turbines, in 2008, there was a need to replace the heating systems in the village buildings. All being built during previous GDR times, there was the opportunity to replace all of the heating systems at once with a village network of biogas heating, and the town decided to do so (with only 1 person out of 120 deciding not to participate… due to the fact that he had rooftop solar panels and wanted to continue taking advantage of the country’s feed-in tariff system).

Aside from providing the villagers with energy independence, this biogas system also helped struggling farmers in the village to survive during a difficult agricultural period.

The biogas system produces up to 500 kW of electricity and 500 kW of thermal energy (heat). The electricity from the biogas system fills in during the 10% of the time when the wind turbines are not producing electricity.

The wind turbines produce electricity more cheaply, so there is a system in place where a small smiley face is located in the homes which shows when electricity is coming from wind power (the face is then smiling) or from biogas (the face is then frowning). Thus, householders can easily use large appliances such as washing machines when the electricity is coming from the wind turbines.

A backup biomass system (for heating) uses waste wood from the local forestry business. It is 100% waste wood and is actually only needed on rare occasions.

Wood biomass system.

Huge Financial Savings

Before this project started six years ago, the village (villagers and companies locate there) paid out 500,000 euros per year for imported energy. Now, they pay out nothing.

When the village asked to feed electricity into E.ON’s grid, E.ON would not agree, so Feldheim decided to build its own grid. Since then, E.ON and the other three large German utilities have blocked every other attempt to create a completely independent village grid like this one. Other green energy communities in Germany just get 40-60% of their electricity from their own green sources.

To finance the biogas system, the villagers took a loan of 1.3 million euros for a 10-year period, which is now 6 years over. That actually results in Feldheim having the cheapest electricity in all of Germany. The Feldheim villagers pay ~17.4 euro cents per kWh, while the average across Germany is ~28 euro cents per kWh. If you look at the situation about 20 years out, Feldheim villagers will likely be paying ~half the national average.

A company that built solar trackers moved in here due to Feldheim’s super cheap electricity. However, as a result of massive drops in the price of solar PV panels in recent years, the solar trackers are no longer that useful and the company is going out of business. Another company is coming in to fill the space, though.

Next Step (Side Story)

The wind farm developer, Energiequelle (Energy Source), is also building a 10 MW battery system, the biggest in the world, using LG battery cells and an Enercon management system. The project has been underway for about 4 years. The developer was originally going to use lead-acid batteries from Japan, and then Siemens was going to do it, and now it has switched to LG. Ground was broken 4 weeks ago.

The battery system, like the Younicos battery system I discussed in another article, will provide primary frequency regulation for the German grid. It will allow Germany to use much more of the renewable electricity Energiequelle produces. Whether or not it competes with the system Younicos has developed, we will have to see, but I think it’s unlikely that Enercon has spent 8 years developing its management system or that it has 50 software engineers and 120 people in total working on it. I’ll have to dig in a bit to see how much is behind Enercon’s system.

To close out, here’s a picture of me charging up my iPad Mini on 100% renewable electricity; a couple pictures of small (500 kW) wind turbine parts on display in the village; and short video of a nice wind farm near the Polish/German border that I recorded on my way back from my 1-week cleantech tour of Germany:

All images by Zachary Shahan | CleanTechnica (available for use under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license)

*My cleantech tour of Germany was hosted by Germany Trade & Invest, with transportation, accommodation, and some meals covered by the organization. No content requirements have been put on me.

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Tags: 100 % Renewable, 100% renewable energy, 100% renewable energy grid, 100% renewable energy village, Biogas, e.on, Feldheim, Germany, Utilities

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Hans

I do wonder why they don’t add PV. It would make their power supply more stable.
Duncan Frame

Great story. I was wondering how E.ON and the other grid suppliers managed to block other developments in other villages. It seems to me if you can get a few independent grids going they can sell excess energy to each other if they are close enough together.
Hans

Hi Zach, interesting article that made me duckduckgo for german articles on the subject that could give even more information.

I can’t help myself must do some nitpicking:

“When the village asked to feed electricity into E.ON’s grid, E.ON would not agree, so Feldheim decided to build its own grid.”

An article in the Süddeutsche has a slightly different version: The reason that the village build a new local grid was that citizens wanted to buy the local distribution grid from Eon*, but Eon did not want to sell.

* In Germany the transmission grid has been separated from the power producing companies, but strange enough the big fossil fuel dinosaurs can still own distribution grids.
- Frank Morris
  
  Hans, is it true that EON and other institutions have prohibited other renewably powered micro grids?
  - Hans
    
    To say it in facebook terms:it is complicated.
    
    If the municipality owns the grid, European rules say that there has to be an auction for the license to operate the grid. Judges often interpret auction conditions that demand some amount of renewable energy and the employment of local people often as tricks to limit competition. And the auction has to be done again, or the license is directly given to one of the big three. However, judgments vary from case to case and about two-hundred communities were able to take back their distribution grids the last decade. Most famous example is Schonau.
    
    If Eon and Co own the grid it is even more complicated.
    
    Furthermore, Eon and Co tend to sabotage the transfer by holding back data on the grid.
Vijay G. Kamat

A great accomplishment indeed.

When the electricity is cheaper, then villagers should start an electric vehicle sharing program like they have in big german cities. Village council has extra cash to do so (from my calculation of savings).

If every light fixture is on LED, then individually homes can save a bit more to charge all the mobile phones.

Every household can have small wind turbines, if that place is really windy. Smaller but efficient archimedes windturbine can power an electric two wheeler for half of the year.

They can replace the old type solar panels with one from www[.]windstream-inc[.]com which can generate from sun and wind from small foot print on the roof.

I have many ideas many of them are simpler. But the problem is I live in India and many of the technologies developed are costly for us.
Frank Morris

Zack, I was in the room with the Republicans and North Koreans…:)
- Bob_Wallace
  
  Are you able to share more? Love to hear a description of how it happened and how the various parties behaved.
Matt

It isn’t really 100% grid independent. Since the wind farm gives them power and then sell extra to grid. Yes they could take all the wind farm power, feather when it is too much; but that would change the cost bases. But getting close, and for sure shows that with a little over build you can get to 100% renewable.
- http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  The wind farm is actually owned by an outsider.
  
  But I think it is grid independent, as it is on its own microgrid.
JamesWimberley

Right about the qualification “first in the developed world”. Half of the world’s villages are off-grid without any electricity. Micro- and mini-solar supplies are spreading fast, from large government and NGO programmes as in Bangladesh to purely market-driven development in Tanzania (link),

It’s very unlikely the official statistics in most countries are capturing the process fully. The impact in total MW installed may not be great, as the individual installations are often tiny, but the impact on quality of life is enormous.
- http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  Yeah, I was soft on them. Have been covering a lot of organizations and companies serving the developing world lately. Off-grid and microgrid development is the norm,

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The Only Grid-Independent Village In The World?