How a village warms itself with cow dung

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Germany 2007: How a village warms itself with cow dung
By Finfacts Team
Jan 16, 2007, 14:38
Juehnde in the state of Lower Saxony is showing Europe how things can be done differently. The village relies exclusively on renewable raw materials and is self-sufficient in producing electricity and heat.
Cows in Juehnde with the bio-gas plant in the background
At first glance time appears to have stood still in Juehnde, located not far from the university city of Goettingen: A village surrounded by green. In the town centre, there's the church, plenty of half-timbered houses and a bakery. Some 750 people live here - in addition to 800 cows and 1,200 pigs. But Juehnde not only stands for Germany's past. Juehnde represents Germany's future.
As the first village of its kind in Germany, Juehnde is completely self-sufficient in electricity and heating. In doing so, it has made itself independent of fossil fuels such as coal and gas. �We are not a village of nutty idealists,� says the physicist Eckhard Fangmeier, who initiated the project. �Here, the electrician is going along with it just as is the 80-year-old grandma or the newcomer just as much as the farmer who has been living here for generations.�
About three-quarters of the people of Juehnde have banded together in a cooperative in order to build and operate a bio-energy plant. Each person had to pay a connecting fee of �1,000 and buy at least 3 shares, at �500 each, of the cooperative. In the long- term, the investment promises a payoff: The participating households expect to save �500 per year in heating costs.
�Juehnde is assuming a vanguard role for all of Europe,� says Birger Kerckow of the Agency of Renewable Resources which has backed the project with more than 3 million euros in funds from the Federal Agriculture Ministry. Particularly noteworthy, says Kerckow, is �the elan with which the people of Juehnde themselves have got the project up and running.�
The bio-gas production plant is located on the village outskirts. With its two silvery-domed roofs, it looks as if something directly from the future has been transplanted there. By now Eckhard Fangmeier could find his way to it blindfolded - he has been there so often, many times showing guests around. In 2006, more than 4,000 visitors came to Juehnde, he reports. There were politicians from the US, scientists from Japan and even a bowling club from a neighbouring village.
�It is always a fascinating view, looking through the glass pane to our 8-metre-tall fermentation tower,� Fangmeier says. Inside the chamber, methane gas bubbles up, at temperatures of 38 degrees, from a mixture of fermenting plants and liquid manure. The gas powers a generator which in its first year produced 3.6 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and was fed into the local electrical network. The heat produced from the facility is meanwhile channelled off into a network which provides heating to the homes of Juehnde.
The plants and liquid manure for the facility are supplied by local farmers who thereby have gained a new source of income. �We had thought we would be earning more from the grain harvest,� says Britta Syring, who has devoted part of her fields to growing maize and tricale - a hybrid of wheat and rye - for the bio-gas plant. She would have earned more by simply growing wheat. But she does not plan to stop. �I think it is fascinating that we can produce the energy ourselves which we will later be using,� Syring says.
� dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
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