Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Bavarian village mayor Josef Demar’s phone has been red-hot. If it is not fellow mayors who want to know how their villages can also become independent from Russian gas, then they are residents who now want to connect their house to the municipal heating network. With every new phone call, the 68-year-old mayor is sweating, heaving a haunted sigh, or mumbling something about his many obligations with a rolling Bavarian r.
But then he pulls himself together and dribbles with surprising agility to his Mercedes to show the local biogas plant or the windmills. After all, Demar is very proud. Because since the Ukraine war started, gas became a scarce commodity and European energy prices went through the roof, almost the whole world knows: as they did in Großbardorf, so we must all learn to do it.
Grossbardorf is located in the far north of Bavaria, surrounded by yellow-green hills full of grain and maize and just below the imaginary line from where people in Germany start to say ‘Grüß Gott’ instead of ‘Guten Tag’. That makes it part of the Franconia region, equipped with its own dialect and alleged character traits. The people here are said to be friendly but tough, moderately interested in the outside world and not particularly flexible. Not exactly a place that is at the forefront with newfangled solutions in the fight against climate change.
Appearances are deceiving, it turns out in the Großbardorfse Rathaus. From the walls in the conference room, a certificate from the federal state of Bavaria praises the ‘outstanding involvement of the municipality and citizens in the renewal of a bio-energy village’. A crucified Jesus stares down at the conference table where Demar has displayed the pride of his village in leaflet form: ‘Großbardorf, towards the future’. At the bottom left of the cover you can just see the biogas plant that has made the village largely energy-independent.
The plan came up with the periodic village renewal, a modernization run at the expense of the state of Bavaria that takes place every few decades. In the sixties the spearhead was ‘staubfrei’, and the entire village was asphalted so that residents no longer lived in a constant cloud of dust. In the 2000s, it was initially about dykes and greening, until the mayor said in 2009: shall we build a heat network so that the oil boilers can retire? Demar and the chairman of the local farmers’ association borrowed the idea from another village, which had just built a biogas plant to heat the natural pool.
In Großbardorf they took a bigger approach: half of the residents took part. Since then, the village has been babbling steadily with the occasional new entrant to the heat network, usually when it was time to replace the expensive domestic oil boiler. But then the war in Ukraine started, and the whole of Germany fell under the spell of energy panic.
Insecure times
With each new supply reduction through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, a new round of emergency scenarios buzzes through the German media, warning the government of potential shortages in the winter ahead. This also leads to a rapid turnaround in Großbardorf. Until 2022, Demar received two or three new requests for connection to the heat network, this year they are standing in line as true regrets: twenty so far. Just a little while and the biogas plant will have to expand.
“The whole country is now thinking about its energy security, so we thought: we should do that too,” says Renate Leicht (61), operator of a kiosk in the regional heart clinic, from the front yard that will soon be opened for a heat network connection. . ‘Certainly also for the climate. But also: you don’t know what else Putin will come up with next. Now we have gas shortages, in the future we may have oil shortages. Fuel oil prices have risen enormously since the war.’
And that’s what heats their homes, just like millions of other German households: oil. The Großbardorf lack of gas was not a choice, says the mayor; According to regional energy companies, the village is too small and isolated to make the connection to the gas network profitable. Residents here have been heating mainly on oil for many years, and the houses have cellars with their own power plants. That of Renate and her husband Bernhard consists of a tank for 4,500 liters of fuel oil, a furnace, and a hot water storage. Twice a year they have the stock filled by tanker, thus burning almost 10 thousand liters of oil.
And a mess that it gives, says Maria Lamprecht (68) from two blocks away, who previously opted for bioheat. The chimney sweep has to come twice a year, your whole basement smells of oil, after every filling that air goes into the house and everyone has a story about that one time when something was loose and half the cellar was full of oil. The tipping point for Maria came twelve years ago, when the snow was so high that at first the tanker could not come and then the prices suddenly increased. She was furious. ‘I’ve got rid of all that stress now. Delicious.’
With your nose on the manure
The source of all joy shines on the edge of the village in the form of four dark green domes and a huge amount of silage maize. On a sweltering Tuesday morning you can smell a poo smell, but then you have to lean your nose against the fermentation kettle. Through a round window, the size of a porthole, you can see the brown gunk inside that gives Großbardorf a large part of its energy. Like a huge pan of particularly filthy Brinta, the mixture – 50 percent silage maize, 30 percent manure, the rest grass and whole plant silage (chopped crops) – revolves around a metal stirrer as it heats to 42 degrees.
At that temperature, enzymes start to create methane, explains manager Marco Seith (48). This then drives the combustion engine in the adjacent building (the methane extraction takes place in phases, hence the four domes). Mechanical energy becomes electrical energy, and so the plant produces 5.4 million kilowatt-hours annually, four times the municipal electricity requirement. But the most important yield is actually a by-product: the cooling water from the engine. Once heated to 90 degrees, this goes through a pipe system into the village, where it then heats the houses that used to need oil: the heat network.
‘This is how the water pipe was laid a hundred years earlier,’ says Seith. ‘Now no one knows how water pumps worked. That will also be the case with the heat network.’
Citizens invariably complain about biogas plants: it stinks, huge amounts of crops have to be grown for biofuel that are neither beneficial to nature nor (animal) food, and all those thousands of tons of biomass thunder through the village streets to the gas plant. But a day of asking around in Großbardorf did not yield a single complaint about the municipal energy policy. “That’s because the heat is for the village,” Seith says. “It all stays here.”
Of course, says Matthias Klöffel (60), foreman of the local farmers’ association and founder of the biogas plant with Demar: you have to make choices. Corn that goes to the biogas plant does not go into food. But so it is with everything around energy and food on an overcrowded planet: a matter of choice. Otherwise you have to turn on the coal-fired power stations, or keep the nuclear power stations on. Or be able to buy Russian gas. Livestock farming, which has always been small-scale here, has disappeared from Großbardorf over the years and increasingly stringent environmental requirements. As a result, no more maize is grown than in the 1970s, except that the crop is now destined for the biogas plant.
Assembly
Not all clichés about the Bavarian countryside turn out to be untrue; the village culture of association is thriving in Großbardorf. The birth of the biogas plant therefore started with a Sammlung, a village meeting where the mayor said: we can get rid of oil with a sustainable alternative, and we are proposing a biogas plant with a heat network. We want to partly finance the heat network by selling residents a share. Anyone who pays 5,000 euros will receive a connection and the right to request a refund after twenty years. Who offers?
Half of them tacked, the other half remained with their arms folded. But the power station was built, and since 2011, 140 households and all communal areas have been receiving heat from biogas. Since then, the village has blown 400 thousand liters less oil into the atmosphere every year. The biogas plant itself is owned by local farmers, who borrowed or invested the money for it. Anyone who promised to supply 40 tons of maize annually could buy a share in the power plant, and at the end of the cycle receive 32 tons of fertilizer mixture (that remains after bios gas production) back for their land as a thank you.
Also nice: the municipality has had a solar park since 2005 and four windmills since 2016. The latter was less controversial here than elsewhere, as Großbardorf pioneered an electricity-generating windmill in 1921 – there is even a miniature statue in the village. Renewable energy, for example, is a source of pride, not controversy. Certainly also because Großbardorf now creates fifteen times as much electricity as it consumes itself. ‘And since Putin went mad, the electricity price has only gone up’, manager Marco Seith exults from behind a computer in the biogas plant. ‘So we’ll put that in our pocket too.’
Twelve Babies
Perhaps even more important than the euros, cubic meters and kilowatt hours, is the optimism that undeniably haunts the village. From the neatly tended flower gardens to the covered football grandstand with its sponsored solar panels and the young parents pushing a pram down the main street, Großbardorf is alive again. Like many villages in the German countryside, Großbardorf also struggled with exodus for a long time. In 2002 the population dropped below 1,000, two years later it was only 870. But now the municipality has 950 proud citizens. A factory that settled here partly thanks to the favorable energy conditions, now offers 230 jobs. Even the young ones are coming back.
“A demographer once predicted that only two or three babies would be born here by 2030,” says Demar. “Well, there must be twelve this year.”
