Source: Energy & Management Powernews, May 09, 2022
Ground heat has the largest untapped potential for expansion of renewable heat. However, there is a lack of a national strategy.
In Munich, the largest deep geothermal plant of Stadtwerke München (SWM) will soon supply 80,000 people in Europe with climate-neutral heat. Near-surface geothermal systems already heat more than 440,000 single- or multi-family homes nationwide. Nevertheless the potential is by far not exhausted, writes the Federal association geothermal energy (BVG) in a communication of 6. May and demands at the same time the policy to compile together with the industry a geothermal energy strategy
Which of the different technologies for the terrestrial heat use in the individual case is load-carrying, depends in each case on regional location conditions, so the industry association. While above all in the south, north and at the upper Rhine also large geothermally operated heating plants are well to be converted like in Munich and Hamburg, near-surface systems could be used in the whole republic.
"First the political will for an extension of the geothermal energy use should be formulated clearly and clearly and from it a geothermal energy extension strategy be developed briskly," says the president of the Federal association geothermal energy (BVG) Helge-Uve brown. "I set with the political conversion on the reasonableness of the responsible political participants and hope therefore that we pull here all at a strand and all obstacles and hindrances for the necessary development of a climaticneutral heat supply together from the way clear, so brown further.
Unlike in the current sector the portion of renewable energies rises only slowly in the heat range. Here, he said, geothermal energy, with the largest as yet untapped expansion potential of all renewables, plays a decisive key role in the heat transition. A recently published meta-study by the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geophysics (Liag) on geothermal potential also points out that without geothermal sources, the transformation of the heating sector to 100% green sources will be difficult to implement.
"Geothermal energy, consisting of near-surface geothermal energy with the use of ground-coupled heat pumps as well as deep geothermal energy, can cover up to 42 percent of the eco-heat for space heating and hot water in the future using established technologies," explained Inga Moeck, professor and head of the Department of Geothermal Energy and Information Systems at Liag and author of the meta-study on the national geothermal strategy. So far, geothermal energy as a renewable eco-heat only accounts for a share of 10% - and thus only about 1.5% of the total heat demand in Germany.
Author: Heidi Roider
