At a press event on Thursday, 21 April, in Giessen's Lahnstrasse, the two SWG board members Manfred Siekmann and Reinhard Paul presented the company's position in the current debate on nuclear power. Together with company spokeswoman Ina Weller, they also provided comprehensive information about the regional energy supplier's current and future strategy in terms of energy procurement and in-house generation.
"We are already supplying all of our household customers with green electricity," explained CEO Manfred Siekmann with reference to some of SWG's key figures: of the approximately 275 million kilowatt hours of electricity that SWG distributes to private customers each year, around 40 per cent, or 109 million kilowatt hours, are already generated directly by SWG using efficient combined heat and power generation. The municipal utility also purchases a further 170 million kilowatt hours of certified green electricity. "Our procurement situation has been like this since the beginning of 2010. Nevertheless, we have not burdened our customers with additional costs," says Manfred Siekmann. The forthcoming electricity labelling, which all suppliers are currently preparing retrospectively for 2010, will therefore show a nuclear power share of zero percent in the products for private customers. This applies to all SWG household customers and not just those who currently purchase a labelled green electricity product.
It was only possible for SWG's private customers to do without electricity from nuclear power because Stadtwerke has been building up decentralised and efficient electricity and heat generation with its own plants since the early 1980s, as Reinhard Paul, Technical Director of Stadtwerke, noted. "With our more than 50 combined heat and power plants with an electrical output of almost 25,000 kW, we can easily keep up with the ecological debate," said Reinhard Paul. This is because the construction of new plants that are as environmentally friendly as possible and replace old large-scale plants is essential for a genuine energy turnaround. A further 5,000 kW will be added in 2011 alone. The combined heat and power plants built by SWG, the biogas plant in Großen-Buseck and the energy centre of the Rhön Clinic with its fuel cell fully meet these requirements.
Critically scrutinising green electricity products
Both board members emphasised the importance of the responsible customer taking a critical look behind the scenes in the entire green electricity debate. The reason for this is the nature of the European electricity grid. This does not allow a direct supply of wind power generated on the coast to Central Hessen from a purely physical point of view - even if this impression is often created. In practice, therefore, various certificates are inevitably used to certify the feed-in of green electricity into the grid, which is sold elsewhere. Many of these certificates do not automatically authorise the construction of new energy generation plants, while in Giessen the municipal utilities are constantly expanding their own generation without charging private customers a surcharge or issuing a special certificate. SWG intends to consistently pursue this path: "By 2020, we expect to produce around 50 per cent of the electricity we supply to households with our own plants and purchase the rest as green electricity. We also want to actively promote the expansion of such plants and are planning to participate in renewable energy plants for around 25 per cent of our household customer sales by 2020," explained Reinhard Paul. The aim is always to replace old plants with new, more environmentally friendly ones - the only sure way to sustainably change the structure of electricity production in Germany.
Meanwhile, SWG is taking the same approach with its new green electricity product "Natura", which replaces the previous "Balance Naturstrom". The working price per kilowatt hour is now more favourable than the previous product and the certification criteria have since been tightened further. The new "Natura" product is available in the "Prima", "Familia" and "Profi" variants, depending on electricity requirements, and all tariffs are backed by the "Green Electricity Label in Gold". This is one of the strictest certificates of all. It not only guarantees the feed-in of nuclear-free green electricity into the grid like normal products in this category, but above all also the expansion of renewable energies through the financing of corresponding generation plants. These in turn make an effective contribution to the energy transition. "Customers of Stadtwerke who purchase the previous green electricity product can simply switch to the new offer and thus consciously accelerate the expansion of renewable and climate-neutral energies," promised company spokeswoman Ina Weller. According to Ina Weller, it is important to understand that it is not primarily about the term "green electricity", but about the plants behind it at the actual place of consumption and the long-term strategy behind it. The municipal utility's strategy for environmentally friendly energy generation is therefore based on a balanced mix of efficient and environmentally friendly electricity generation through more and more of its own plants, the expansion of its own EEG plants in SWG's supply area, participation in EEG plants and the sale of green electricity of the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price. In principle, however, SWG's task is to ensure that customers can be certain that they are purchasing sustainably generated energy. However, this has already been largely achieved today.