A few days ago I did a post on the first solar-powered town in the United States: Babcock Ranch near Fort Myers, Florida. This got me thinking about other solar-powered and energy efficient cities across the world. Not to my surprise, one of the first communities to become energy self-sufficient is in Germany.
Feldheim, Germany, located about 50 miles from Berlin, is a village of around 145 residents. Instead of focus on solar-power, Feldheim residents first experienced the creation of a wind farm. Today this wind farm has grown to 47 turbines, producing 175 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year.
This number didn’t mean much to me, until I read that the community only uses 1% of that electricity. That was shocking.
Similar to Babcock Ranch, the excess power is sold back to into the electrical grid for the rest of the country. As a result of this German residents in Feldheim pay about ⅓ the electrical costs compared to other German villages.
In addition to their original focus on the wind farm, they have since added solar components (with battery storage unlike Babcock Ranch, then again, it costed 13 million…) and a biogas facility.
Despite being a small, rural town, Feldheim is leading the country’s energy revolution. More on that to follow.
Thank you for reading! Check out these articles and videos for more information:
- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-10/german-village-first-to-become-energy-self-sufficient/5879360
- http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-power-grid-of-their-own-german-village-becomes-model-for-renewable-energy-a-820369.html
-Jenna