Germany: Company Uses 56 Degree Celsius Geothermal Waters to Heat Factory

Power from the own harvest (KfW Group)

Heat energy from the earth warms the factory halls at Wipotec

The founder and Managing Director of Wipotec, a world-leading provider of weighing technology,  Mr Düppre, an engineer by profession and still developing weighing technology, discovered a new field of activity: renewable energies. Yet, bucking the trend, he did not focus on potential above the ground, like solar or wind energy, but instead went below the earth:

"For me, geothermal energy at 1,500 to 1,800 metres below the surface is the energy source of the future."

It seems expensive, but Mr Düppre hired a firm from the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which does without a large drilling rig for such medium-deep geothermal probes and gets by with a lorry as the platform. When looking for funding, Mr Düppre also stumbled upon KfW's "Renewable Energies - Premium" programme: "Without it, we wouldn't have achieved all this."

"All this", at Wipotec, is quite a bit. Beside one of the factory halls there is a concrete cover in the ground. Beneath it there is a pipe that goes 1,500 metres into the sandstone. There, the temperature is 56 degrees. Water flows down through a pipe, is heated, and then returns to the earth's surface at 30 degrees. This runs all of the underfloor heating that is installed in all of the buildings – across a total of 18,000 square metres.

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