This German village managed to go off grid and become energy self-sufficient | DW News
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2022
- Residents of Feldheim, a village south of Berlin, have managed to produce their own energy from wind, sun and agricultural waste. They are now paying around a third of what everyone else in Germany pays for power. Their solution has become a role model for communities around the world. Here’s how they achieved the Feldheim Energy Miracle - and what others can learn from their success.
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#renewableenergy #Germany #climatechange
Setting the environmental advantages aside, I love how they took control to secure their own energy future. I have done the same thing at my personal household level. It is very empowering!
Eye=Ego
LOVEevol=ILlUsiON
FUture=fanTASY
per/son
Only possible in countries like Germany, where single person feel part of a community where everybody feel accomplished when gives positive contribution. Simply impossible in individualistic countries like Italy, unfortunately.
@@ClaudioCosta1900 The possibilities present themselves to those who are willing to seek them. The politicians in power are lazy, incompetent or corrupt everywhere, including Germany. The main factor which makes changes for the better possible is almost always the individuals who are unsatisfied with the current status quo and invest their time and money to make a change. Every such person can make a huge difference.
@@ClaudioCosta1900 CoUNTtry*
per-son
COMmonUNITY
POSItive=YESsaying
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@@allenaxp6259 Eye=Ego
solRA-System=DEad'
GREen=IN-EXperiEnced
This is a beautiful example of a community owned Microgrid. We will start to see more and more of these kinds of projects over the coming years and decades.
Congrats to Germany. Many farmers in my ancestral village- which has been suffering from drought- are converting their farms into solar farms. Initial capital required is a lot- but several government agencies provide very soft loans. The farmers are now making good profits.
Good news!
"government agencies" so they took giant loans from the government, congrats to them - now the gov owns their farm... one very recent trick done all around the world in the last decade is to make farmers take up huge debt, so that the farm end up in the hands of banks and government once they default on their own (with banks and government making sure to create the right situation with taxation, crooked laws, and inflation)
@@kuiperbond8460 Except edible oils, My country (India) is not dependent on any country for food. Our problem is food wastage due to spoilage, logistics and distribution. 67 Million tonnes of food are wasted every year - due to poor storage infrastructure and management.
@@kuiperbond8460 That isn't really correct, depending on how you do it, you can combine solar and farming, this is called agrovoltaics. It overall increases the general output of the field, and only slightly diminishes the seperate parts output. Like 80% of the normal crops compared to just crops and 80% of PV vs just PV: 160% field output, or thus a 60% increase.
Obviously I don't know if they did that in this case, but it can be done and one of the test projects that proved this was in Germany.
Trap - Spain did something similar and completely failed.
Good luck- hopefully history doesn't repeat.
I'm glad to see It's possible not only in my mind! This should be on the news every night to wake up all the people!
just spread it via your Insta and youtube channels and start a movement
@Apsoy Pike True but people can still utilize what they have. I live in the mountains that are way to steep for agriculture but thanks to the evelation we can use hydropower and there are also several regions in Germany where thermal energy through drilling is possible. At the end of the day people have to be flexible and work with what they have.
@Apsoy Pike nuclear like the french who had to shut down over half of their plants for months simply because it was to hot which will happen more and more often every summer and then had so subsitute that with renewable energy from Germany?
@Apsoy Pike Wind also blows at night, water runs down dams at night and biomass also decomposes at night...the only reason their inflation is so low is because energy is currently heavly subsidized aka future generations of french have to pay for it and people always claim sodium reactors are so amazing and yet they never passed the stage of some experimental reactors despite being a known concept for decades. Don't get me wrong I am not opposed to nuclear but way to many people in recent years became really blue eyed (don't know if that's also a saying in english it means something like naïve) when it comes to nuclear.
@Apsoy Pike True, the debate about nuclear indeed moved away from sience and became to much about emotions and I also agree that energy storage is already a major issue and will sadly only get worse in the coming years. The next couple of years will probably define Europes energy futue for the decades to come.
A similar, but older project was started 2005 in Lower Saxony. The, so called, Bioenergiedorf Jühnde, near the city of Göttingen, was built to produce and deliver warm water and electric energy made out of plant's silage. The project was the first of this kind in the world. The Agricultural University of Göttingen and the Technical Institute for Agriculture of Witzenhausen were the Scientific Guardians, who lead the research and collected the data. People joint voluntarily, paid for a share and the technical installation. The members of this venture received heated water from the Plant through an installed Pipe Network and the electric energy was fed into the grid. I was, and still am, a big fan of renewable energies. It was very interesting to follow the development of this venture!
True democracy in action!!!
This should be a blueprint for the future of planning estates and investing in modernising existing living areas.
This is really cool! Go Germany! More of THIS!!
wonderful project, *from now on Germany should start an initiative to bring on such deconcentrated forms of renewable green energy projects in very city and village with a long term plan of expanding it to whole europe and the world even* ! *self sufficiency gives us freedom* !
eh tell that to the russians
@@josfur1977 russians r fulll of oil and gas, infact the russian state would never ever bring on such change in their land due to the conflict of interest!
But thn ur fav flat earth beliving Arab world will collapse and turn to Terrorism
@@Urbanhunter49 Gott mit uns
I am excited to see this show, it can be done with research and experimentation. Love that they sell surplus of energy. The rest of the world needs to think more outside the box be flexible and work together.
The power lobby in Germany will prevent widespread decentralisation
This story is missing a lot of important info. How do they make electricity when the wind isn't blowing? Why did they build 100 times more wind capacity than they need? How long will it take for energy savings to pay off the capital costs of the turbines, PV panels, etc...? It's easy to use renewables to generate power; the hard part is making it economically worthwhile. Too bad you didn't address this.
Wind turbine takes about 15-20 years to pay for itself. No there is not electricity if the wind is not blowing I don’t know why they built more then they needed…?
Sounds good, especially for remote communities. I'm not sure how it would scale up to supply big cities, but if these little villages can produce so much excess power, perhaps it's doable. One of the advantages of wind towers is that they have such a small footprint. You can still use the land under them for other things like farming. Solar should be on every roof. We should be looking at geothermal as well.
The huge surplus in wind-energy is going to Berlin.
The people on the land can provide space for wind and solar to power the cities. Just like they produce the food fod the cities. Although we should think about wind turbines on rooftops as well as solar so the cities become not so dependent.
@@jacoboc2244 dams are a very bad option , so bad for the local environment ecosystems and have a gigantic footprint taking up productive land and ecosystems . Many hydro dams in the world are silting up and becoming useless and with the droughts predicted some will go out or commission periodically
Tidal . yes there is some promising innovation going on there
Rivers ? what do you have in mind ?
Big cities will need energy from other areas, but that is all doable. It is all just a question of will.
also whats not mentioned here,
they produce a surplus of electricity but then use the grid so that they dont have to us ebatteries or turn of wind turbines
the grid has to favor renewables by law, but really the volatility is pretty expensive to deal with
@@jacoboc2244 with current technology it takes about 3 g of raw polysilicon to get a watt of solar power. The world currently needs about 15 TW to run everything. So 15E12 W x 3 g/W = 45E12 g which is equal to 45 million tonnes.
Incidentally that’s also about $2T in today’s money.
In 2020 (a single year) just 6 companies together in China producing polysilicon made about 1% of the 45 million needed tonnes mentioned above. There’s plenty of material to get this done.
Also note:
1) This is just solar alone. Almost no 100% renewables scenario is solar only.
2) Electrification would reduce the needed power by perhaps 2/3 to 5 TW. Making this much easier.
3) This is just with today’s tech and materials and supply chain. Developments will shift us to perovskites etc. which are even less materially intensive. Solar by square meter could be as cheap as a square meter of paper+foil.
Such miracles happen when people do not just sit confortably on their sofa's enjoying a nice bag of chips but instead think what they can do to strengthen their positions and the ones of their community. They very much deserve enormous respect!!
Don't knock the power of renewable energy or the comfort of a bag of chips!
But there are also some other communities in Gemany doing the same thing.
I guess in Schleswig-Holstein and Baden-Würtemberg.
And as far as I learned they are allowed to sell thier produced energy directly.
Anyway, if people come together and work together so much can be achieved ! 💜
Thanks for this video. It is so nice to see that it is possible, the scary part are the huge energy companies who don´t want to lose control, even in a tiny village like this one. How about the water supply and treatment? Are they also independent on that? Just curious...
I really think a lot about projects like this and it is so interesting! There should be like a subsidized village where universities and companies could do research and people can test it on a day to day basis saving money and helping with the research itself :-)
My home can be completely energy independent. I installed solar and a battery a few years ago and I got a heat pump installed. I have slowly switched over my natural gas appliances to electric. In several cases I have maintained the option to use NG if I choose. Example I have a heat pump and a NG furnace, I have s NG hot water heater and a heat pump hot water heater.
En la costa del Caribe en México también existe un pueblito autosufuciente en energía, que sin tantas pretensiones lo lograron hace 5 años.
That’s amazing. All these villages creating there own power are beacons of progress and capable of assisting the rest of the world with their knowledge.
Very impressive, would be good to see how the place progresses over the next few years, especially with large scale battery storage coming in.
This is what is required to make intermittent renewable into useful base load power. Of course it requires an array of 3,360 lithium-ion battery modules - more than 20 per person and is rather expensive, but in principal this is a good outcome. I personally feel a lower cost method storing power is required if you wish to scale up to a large town, most likely a water storage system. 100-200MW/hr for at least a few hours of load is required for a town 10-20 times larger. This would also assist in increasing the efficiency of existing nuclear and to a lesser extend coal fired power. Unused power can be fed into the storage solution when demand is low. This means less power generating capacity is required, which is exactly what German needs now as it may need to turn off its gas powered plants.
Ein ähnliches, älteres Projekt ist das Bioenergiedorf Jühnde, bei Göttingen. Dort wird, seit 2005 Wärme und Strom aus Pflanzenmasse und Sonne gewonnen.
If only federal, local governments, insane restrictions, greedy network operators and energy corps supported rather than blocked any effort to do the same thing in other villages and towns. So entire smaller towns could go off-grid and provide their citizens with cheap and clean energy, even those who cannot afford to go solar and off-grid on their own. We need more places like Feldheim.
Why are people in the comments so dismissive? They pay half for heating and electricity, who can't approve of that?
now ? I think they 10x less lmfao
@@josfur1977 They say in the video that they are now paying half for energy (heating + electricity). I presume some of it is to a common loan for those not having EUR 3000 for the district heating plumbing + whatever else the wind turbine shares cost?
@@Tore_Lund what I was saying is that maybe this was shot before fascist putin invaded ukraine.
I’m glad this experiment worked out well for them.
I’m curious as to why they need agricultural waste for heating? If you’re electrifying the grid to that extent then wouldn’t it make sense to just have electric heaters?
Is energy from agricultural waste cheaper than renewable? 🤔
in sweden about 37% of our energy and heating is from biomass
Heating with electricity is considerably less efficient than through exothermic chemical reactions such as burning some fuel.
Specifically resistance based electric heating is inefficient.
@@preetham4948 I see! I did not know about how inefficient electric heaters actually were.
That’s unfortunate. I thought the cost to run these heaters would be cheaper or at least comparable to gas heaters.
@@preetham4948 Hmm... My house is fully electrically heated (via a deep-bore heat pump) and at current price levels, it's still more efficient (that is, cheaper) than subsidized gas. Until, of course, the heat pump goes wrong and the repair bills come up (much higher than for a gas burner). Or until the power line goes down and I have to rely on a diesel and a wood stove. But when it's good, it's good.
Agricultural waste is also renewable.
Thank you Germany, you lead when it comes to innovation.
You mean ideology. No way this is somehow a sufficient method to use on every single village.
LOL…No they don’t. Far from it
Good luck getting this done nationwide in the next 5 years.
Energy and neccesity grow as Individual or in community like this is only solution to live sustainable. We should learn to independent of economy via sharing caring and helping each other
If you have so much excess energy you can easily heat with electricity as well! No need for biomass at all.
This is the future, away from the big operators who sell electricity at inflated prices
this is how you give power back to the people! literally!
Der Brandenburger Weg (The Brandenburg Way) 👍 "Substantive politics before party politics". We're in Berlin and Brandenburg culturally more communal, individualistic and autonomous and hope we will see more of this. It's difficult. Lots of villages are put silent by corrupt politicians and are outweighed by cities.
6:20 As a local patriotic, this fuels my heart with warmth - that municipalities from across continents can learn from each other.
How do they manage baseload during low sun, low wind conditions? Do they have a bank of batteries installed?
Burning manure.
I'm suspicious this wasn't addressed. Since wind and sun are constant, I'd guess they still use main power. It's just in aggregate they produce more than they need. Don't get me wrong: that's still laudable; just not the whole picture.
@@thailine75 You gotta believe!
Shesh they only told the good things
I read up on it because I was also curious about that. They have a few extra ways to deal with that not adressed in the video. First, the biogas installation also produces power, so they always produce a little. There is also power storage capacity for 2 days with a large battery pack installed in a local barn that serves as the visitor center. And for very cold days they have an extra heating source with a wood-chip heating system.
So it looks like they need to get their power from the normal grid after 2 to 3 days of covered sun and less wind.
Truly Commendable.
Pootin’s worst nightmare, when nobody will need his olive oil
Great and fantastic work, congratulations.
Great job!
All they need is one production facility of any kind and they'll be back to the grid.
Or selling energy to the production facility
What rubbish. They said they sell 99% back to the grid. They also make gas which can be stored.
@@AORD72 and like he said, that's only possible because they don't have production facilities or do any energy intensive industry.... but hey, I'm not complaining about your high energy prices.... I'm collecting a 40% dividend. Keep trying to speedrun green energy. You make investors rich. Blackrock is the one who pushes ESG... You guys are so gullible to believe rich investors, Warren buffet is buying energy stocks and you still can't figure the grift out.
@@Tential1 "You guys are so gullible to believe rich investors" wtf. You can power your own house in my country by buying solar panels. If you by enough panels the grid pays you 1/4 of the price you pay for a kWh so the excess you generate is used to pad for night power (you don't need to buy a battery). You can pay the solar off in less than 7 years.
@@Tential1 Except the whole point is that this village's power production was _not_ set up by rich investors, and in fact the rich investors who own the region's power company tried to sabotage it by denying them access to the grid for their locally produced energy.
This is a fascinating case study.
Very good example of a microgrid, Thank you for sharing
Good to see even to the point of installing a new power grid to the town but their radio reception would be totally messed up.
the land area for the power generation is huge, its like 4x as big for the tiny little village.... imagine seeing something like a power production 4x the size of LA, and that isn't even counting building up... just flat...
@Boom Bot how I wish I can live in such true democracy country where even ordinary folks allowed to have their own high-tech running system on their own hand without government involvement 👍👌
Very cool every small town should have its own grid Incase it is needed
Very very nice example Germany is setting! Great!
moving there next month. lets go
Fantastic. You should consider the sand battery as well. Refer to Finland sand battery. Amazing stuff. Cheap reliable and totally environmentally friendly
I was hoping to see the battery storage building, did I miss it? nice set up though.
Spread the good news and make a greener world
Bravo❗️
For any one curious about what democratic socialism means, this is it. It isn't the wholesale removal of profit. Rather the benefits go to all the people, not just a tiny elite. Another example of this is municipal broadband in places like Chattanooga, Tennessee. There is no reason we can't fight for change like this in our communities.
@Ronald Jordan! Stop crying 😭 in RUclips comment sections, you look like a Trump crazy! You are humiliating yourself.
What kind of average wind do you need to create a productive wind farm? I have some property that might work for this purpose in western WA USA
Beautiful
Should also throw some geothermal in the mix as a year round heat source. This is the way.
Here in the Philippines, particularly in the rural areas, we have electric cooperatives. No more middle men involved.
The Philippines has a lot to learn from Feldheim.
My question would be does this place have high speed internet connection? Both in terms of 4G in mobile n wired broadband
Is every household shut down during periods of no wind ? Is any kind of energy storage used ? Is the grid cut off from the windmills or only cut from the residencial users ?
I asked similar questions here, my bet is that the self sufficiency comes from selling to the main grid during the day and buying during the night
Decentralised power grid is almost impossible to destroy or tamper with and hence a security advantage
Super .All countries should have 100 percent self generating renewable powered model cities
I am curious whether they have an energy storage and if so which type of storage (battery, hydrogen, ...).
I learned four things from this vid.
For a project like this to succeed, you need four thing: 1. vision, 2. leadership, 3. local participation, and 4. willingness and resources to fight bureaucracy.
It’s possible to do this and it should be tried whenever possible, but to scale to a larger level conditions 3 and 4 become progressively more difficult.
And 5. 1 windmill per 3 residents
You for got about hundreds of millions of dollars
As the environment changes across the world. Usage of some areas can change to make this more viable.
Areas that are made for farming for example as the arid land is exhausted, it becomes a possibility to change that land to wind turbine areas.
As energy cost rises and solar panels efficiency and cost improves it will become a viability to have homes, buildings equipped with them to add to the grid.
Making our energy grid have redundancy and efficient has to be part of our goal.
This could be done here in Colombia and I'm hopeful the new administration will help the communities get into solar and wind
I live on a sailboat. Just parked 6 month in cartagena.
My wind turbine on my boat literally didn't produce enough for not even 1% of my boat in 6 months.
It's not working. Bad investment
Solar energy is nice as an extra but should not be the main energy provider. It's just not enough to power an entire home
If you add batteries to your house to store the energy for every house. You would deplete the planet of all its resource it it is a bigger natural desaster than gasoline or oil or gas.
It's simply not green energy. But people don't see it
no mention of where electricity comes from on the roughly 50% of days without enuf wind to generate power . the solar back up is very small , probably close to zero power in the winter . do they have ( very expensive ) battery storage ?
I don't see any factories or industrial production centers ?
As long as the sun shines & the wind blows, Feldheim will be fine.
GOOD SHOULD BE MORE OF THAT !
One of the things I don't seen mentioned here is the population country. As with any other resources, overpopulation is have have killed many energy efficient options for some countries thanks to governments that rather have overpopulation that can be taxed than a healthy population count that can be self-sufficient.
We living in times that we barely have fresh water for everyone but still okay to have more kids than hamsters does.
Actually population growth through amount of births is already greatly decreased, the main reason we still see a population growth in the next few decades is people growing older than before (worldwide ofcourse). In fact in many regions of the world (usually the more developed ones) birthrates are actually too low to maintain the current population size, which will either force them to take more immigrants or deal with societal aging and population shrinking problems.
Do they have 24/7 uninterrupted supply of electricity?
Amazing. Very forward thinking, I would love to live in a community like that. My only concern is the amount of land wind farms take. Looks like many times more than the town itself. Sure the land below could still be used but wind farms stretching over the horizon would cross a lot of private property and most likely raise ecological concerns. That can't be scalable. Maybe nuclear for large cities and wind/solar for towns with space.
They also said they're exporting 99% of the power they generate, so they are way over-producing and could get away with much less space. Or, alternatively, you could have a city ringed by a number of these villages that supply it with juice. Nuclear is way too expensive anyways, even if we ignore the risks and the waste.
My town is way bigger than this one and could produce enough electricity with +-10 turbines. It is exactly because they export most of this power to othr reasons they have installed so many wind turbines.
Without big generators the grid becomes way to unstable.
How do you produce aluminum and fertilizers in this village?
That's a lot of wind turbines. They are everywhere you look. I prefer rooftop solar.
Micro grids are the way to go for Rural communities..
This is the only sustainable way to go. We have to stop energy companies monopoly based on oil and gas. This needs to be supported.
well done, better for the world and better for it's people. but especially good for this german town that is now self sufficient in energy.
They are not off grid. They are an argo community and they generate massive amounts of bio waste. But...what is the bio waste? It is material that could be put back on their fields but is instead used as fuel to run "generators" because you cannot store enough wind and solar during the winter to heat a home. So, in every measurable way, they are not off grid. They have transferred the burden to other commodities they need but now in larger quantities to off set the losses due to transferred use of bio waste.
the biowaste can be used as fertilizer after degassification.
So your argument is that they should let the rotting biowaste just polute the environment by releasing methane ? Very smart.
Whenever some place is almost 100% renewables it's always "a village" or "a community" but never a city of millions.
Because they don't even try this, there is no community feeling etc.
And obviously even more important, they don't have the space to do this, they always will have to import energy and so much more from somewhere. This has always been the case with larger cities. That is one of the big downsides of cities.
Great!
Where is the heavy industrial zone to produce those panels and wind turbines?
Now who's saying sorry now in Germany! Kudo to the village.
I think this is proof that energy generation and storage needs to be made smaller. Tesla batteries in some ones garage for example. If we're going to make proper use of renewables like wind and solar, we need storage solutions. Small communities can run very efficient natural gas turbines even that could kick in when solar and wind aren't enough. This is the future.
WOW!
But the materials needed to build the village and people require to survive eg cloths cell phones, these products are made with oil and gas.
Tania Keen
True and Most of those things are made in Asia ,so they buy Russia oil and you can seem like the good guys but funny thing is you still buying from Russia just comes from another partner, all good no worries just remember Russia bad, west good
Do they require the oil and gas or the energy that comes from oil and gas? Because that energy can also come from solar or wind power.
Are you suggesting they produce them on site?
Making solar panels and wind turbine also require oil and gas 😂 even if Germany wants to turn the the country back to a farming community, still need oil and gas to produce some part of their products 😂
@@nbgoodiscore1303 Well i doubt those wind turbines are made by fossile free steel. Also there's a big concern regarding the disposal as you can't just recycle them as any other metals. That being said, hopefully the benefits outweigh the negatives.
This is good news, though their wind turbines still have vast potential for upgrades.
Since the village it's off grid, what does it do to the surplus energy produced in strong winds?
It exports it. The village is offgrid, but the power supply from the windturbine provide both this small micro grid and the larger grid. Ofcourse they could completely isolate their microgrid with a few windturbines (maybe they did, but I doubt it), at which point they'd just have to curtail the operation of the turbines depending on the energy demand.
Could someone help me understand what happens during the night time? Do they have farm of batteries? Do they have bio-waste electricity along with heat facility? Or do they sell power to the main grid during the day and buy during the night?
Depending on the region there still will be wind at night and energy demand is then much lower. Obviously having batteries for the night might be a good idea/next step if not done yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a small gas generator that can run on their selfproduced gas and kicks in when electricity supply gets too low.
No downsides. Balanced reporting.
I simply cannot SMASH the like button enough 👍
How did they manage intermittency
Its possible to do this with out heavy industry but remember where the solar panels, wind turbines and batteries come from.
It is ridiculous. All you need is 3000 Euros per inhabitant or household and some.willpower to love with some.constructionsitre , and BAM, you are independent of the big energy leeches. This should be done everywhere. Grassroots democracy at its best.
If the climate is rapidly changing and we won't solve this problem by only rely energy which is depending on the weather it only makes problems.
What happens when you have extreme temperatures cold, wind, drought, wildfire, and so on.
I hate that people dislike wind-turbines so they put it where the other animals live. Very nice - not
Paradise in Germany without dependency on Bloody Russian oil.
This village shows what it is possible when the government doesnt slow you down. Many german politicians practiced lobbyism in favour of Gazprom, no more.
when the government doesnt slow you down???? they just showed that 1.7 million euros came from goverment funds!
@@casbarbosa37 1.7 million euros, yes that is called slowing down, not ignoring!
make a report
about Wolfhagen, hessen too
This isn't a miracle, it's common sense.
Now do that for the entire country
Love mother earth
Good. Those original and very real greens
[ the ones who weren't merely careerists looking for an easy career progression ]
started this decades ago.
Well done everyone who stayed with the movement and didn't succumb to careerist greed.
They never say how much it cost them. There are villages in Alaska run on wind turbines but they have fossil fuel back up. The cost for the turbines is exorbitant
The german father told his young son as he was about to use the shower "only use the cold water". " Why?" Ask the child. " Because of the sanctions to punish Russia " Replied the Father. The youngster thought for a moment and then asked "are we Russians?".