The Mönchengladbach Seestadt or ‘lakeside city’ in North Rhine-Westphalia is one of several sites in Germany to become a ‘living laboratory of the energy transition’ within the TransUrban.NRW scheme. The new development will demonstrate how a former coal mining area can be transformed into an attractive, low-CO2 neighbourhood using a combination of renewable energy sources for district heating.

At the launch event, Oliver Krischer, State Secretary to the German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK), praised the project highly: "In order to achieve the climate protection goals, we need to implement necessary measures even faster than before. The Urban Lakeside Quarter [...] shows how it is possible to convert the energy supply in a former lignite mining area to low-CO2 technologies. We need experience like this to make decisive progress in the far-reaching transformation of the energy system in Germany towards climate neutrality." Krischer was joined at the ceremony by around 300 participants from business, politics, and science as well as local people.

Over the next few years, 2,000 apartments will be built along with offices, hotels, and service facilities. The buildings will be heated by geothermal energy, extracted via a field of subterranean probes beneath the nearby lake. Waste heat will also be recovered using heat exchangers in the greywater sewers and then fed into the heating network and raised to a suitable temperature using heat pumps. Furthermore, the new Mönchengladbach train station will be powered by a climate-friendly, low-temperature energy system.

The project is the fifth ‘energy-optimised neighbourhood’ to have been launched as a ‘reallab’ – a BMWK initiative for road-testing innovative technologies under real conditions and on an industrial scale. The BMWK is funding TransUrban.NRW with a total of EUR 16.7 million.