Hamburg launches geothermal project after 10 years of planning. (picture alliance / dpa)
After a planning period of around 10 years, the German city state of Hamburg will start drilling the first borehole for northern Germany's first geothermal energy project this summer. In the process, 130-degree hot water will be brought to the surface from a depth of three and a half kilometers, where the heat will be extracted from it and then the cold water will be pumped back into the ground, said the managing director of Hamburg Energie, Michael Prinz, on Wednesday. This alone could supply approximately 5,000 dwellings with heat, he said. If this achieved a thermal output of between 10 and 14 megawatts then in addition electricity could be produced.
The project is to be finished by 2023/24. Prinz estimated the investments including all plants and an aquifer storage at approximately 76 million euro, of which 22.5 million euro was to be provided in funding from the federal government. The geothermal plant, he said, is the centerpiece of the "IW3 - Integrierte Wärmewende Wilhelmsburg" project, which is intended to become a blueprint for the environmentally friendly supply of geothermal energy in northern Germany. In the Bavarian capital of Munich, 500 megawatts of thermal output have already been tapped via geothermal energy, according to the Hamburg's environment minister, Jens Kerstan, a member of the Greens.
"It's really about using almost inexhaustible heat from the earth's interior to heat homes at very low cost in the long term," Kerstan said. This is a great opportunity to phase out coal more quickly and meet climate targets, he said.
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