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.
Read More........