Near the small town of Kötschach, one of Austria’s first hydropower plants was built back in 1886. A few years later, the small plant started to supply Kötschach with electricity, which thus became one of the first towns in Western Austria with its own private electricity network. A direct line leads to modern Kötschach, since today this town and nearby Mauthen are nearly self-sufficient with electricity and heating - supplied with electricity from local small-scale hydropower stations and other renewable sources like wind and solar power, and provided with heating by a biomass- and biogas-fuelled district heating plant. Renewables are all the rage in Kötschach.
Danfoss has supplied the heating plant in Kötschach with 36 substations. The heating system is computerized
thanks to the Danfoss Energy Control System, meaning the heating plant is in constant contact with the controllers (Nopro controller type: OPR 0010) on each substation. This makes the whole system very effective and saves a lot of energy - and in other words money and CO2.
Green electricity for all of Austria
The family-owned energy company Alpen Adria Energie (AAE ) is the direct heir to the builder of the first hydropower plant, and is supplying Kötschach-Mauthen with electricity based on renewable hydropower produced in the mountains. But its ambitions are much higher: - We are supplying all the customers
in Kötschach-Mauthen, but at the same time we are connected to the public electricity network and are selling
green electricity (öko-Strom) to customers in Austria, Wilfried Klauss Jr. tells us. AAE has more than 7000 customers - big and small - all over Austria. And in these days of climate change the trend towards green energy is constantly increasing, no matter that the price per kWh is a little higher than average electricity prices in Austria. 90% of the electricity generated comes from hydropower, the rest from wind and biomass.
At the biomass plant
The biomass plant is situated just outside the center of Kötschach with its 3600 residents. It is plain to see that they are dealing with biomass here, since the storage facilities are filled with wood chips, delivered mainly by a local sawmill. In Kötschach energy production from renewable sources does not only bring CO2 emissions down - it also creates jobs and income to local residents.
The plant is a heating plant (no electricity production) supplying all the big energy users in town, including all public buildings like schools, kindergartens and the town council. The DH network is 3.3 km long, there is still scope for expansion, though, since most single-family houses are not yet supplied by energy from renewables.
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