2006 is the "EnBW Year of Hydropower"

Karlsruhe. “2006 is the year of hydropower for EnBW. We will continue to invest in the development of our hydroelectric power stations,” said EnBW’s Chief Technology Officer Prof. Dr. Thomas Hartkopf at the start of the hydropower campaign. EnBW Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg plans to underscore its sustained engagement for power generation from regenerative hydropower with an eye-catching poster campaign at 16 hydroelectric power stations in Baden-Wuerttemberg on, among other locations, the Neckar, Rhine and Kocher rivers. With a current capacity of almost 400 MW*, around 1.5 million people in the domestic Baden-Wuerttemberg market alone can be supplied with electricity from a source free of CO2 emissions. In Baden-Wuerttemberg in particular the proportion of electricity supplied by regenerative hydropower is to be increased.

“We will continue to redouble our efforts to fully exploit the rich hydropower potential in Baden-Wuerttemberg, particularly with climate protection in mind,” says Hartkopf. Banners visible from afar at 16 hydroelectric power stations will display the proportion of CO2 emission-free hydropower electricity generated by the respective power stations. EnBW is exemplary in generating electricity from hydropower with low CO2 emissions: the same quantity of electricity produced by lignite power stations would result in the release into the atmosphere of 2.3 million tons of CO2 annually. To achieve the same climate-protection effect through reforestation 2,350 hectares of forest would have to be planted, the approximate equivalent of 2,200 football fields. This forest with its 1.4 million trees would need to grow for 50 years before it were capable of absorbing the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that is saved annually by EnBW hydropower.

Not only is EnBW optimizing its large hydroelectric power stations in Rheinfelden and Iffezheim, it is increasingly exploiting locations with smaller potential. The construction of new hydroelectric power stations on the Rhine at Kehl and Breisach has just been decided upon, and the construction of a further power station at Esslingen on the Neckar is in the pipeline. The reconstruction of the existing power station at Ohrnberg on the Kocher should be completed by mid-2006, which will see the capacity of that plant more than double from 2,700 to 6,000 MWh.

By expanding and modernizing existing plants, today EnBW is already the forerunner in large-scale hydroelectric plants and has a leading position among companies producing hydropower in Germany. The construction of the hydroelectric power station at Rheinfelden is the largest construction project currently under development in the field of renewable electricity production, and once the fifth turbine planned for the Iffezheim plant is commissioned it will become the largest run-of-river power station on the Rhine.

*(Includes EnBW shares in Neckar AG and in the Energiedienst Holding Group)