Last rotor blade installed in Bad Lauchstädt Energy Park

With the installation of the last rotor blade, completion of the total of 8 turbines for the Bad Lauchstädt energy park is imminent. In April 2023, Terrawatt Planungsgesell-schaft mbH began building the site access roads and assembly areas as well as pouring the founda-tions. The first tower components, nacelles and rotor blades of the V 162-6.2 MW model were de-livered by Vestas in late summer last year, so that assembly work could begin in October. The first of the eight wind turbines was – almost symbolically – the first wind turbine anywhere in Germany to be connected to the grid in January 2024. Since then, the other turbines have gradually been assembled and connected. 

“This marks the end of a busy and exciting time for us. We have put a lot of effort into realising this project over the past last years - besides all the work involved we have invested almost EUR 73 million. It is therefore a wonderful sight to now see eight of the latest generation of Vestas tur-bines fully assembled in front of us, especially as the weather conditions made assembly very chal-lenging for us at many points,” commented Falk Zeuner, Managing Director of Terrawatt Pla-nungsgesellschaft mbH.

Parallel to the construction of the wind farm, which has a rated output of 50 megawatts and will therefore generate up to 145 million kWh of green electricity per year, a transformer station was built and commissioned in the immediate vicinity in the second half of last year. This means that we can initially feed the electricity generated into the public grid until the electrolysis plant is complet-ed, thus supporting the regional, climate-neutral energy supply. After completion of the electrolys-er, the green electricity will primarily be used directly for electrolysis with only any surplus capacity being fed into the grid. 

“With the installation of all eight wind turbines, the first value-added stage of our energy park, the generation of green electricity, is nearing completion. This brings us another decisive step closer to our ultimate goal of implementing all stages of the green hydrogen value chain at the Bad Lauchstädt Energy Park. We’re very happy about this and at the same time this spurs us on to press ahead with the remaining work, i.e. the construction of the electrolysis plant and the extension of the converted gas pipeline to our first customer, TotalEnergies Raffinerie Mitteldeutschland,” ex-plained Cornelia Müller-Pagel, Project Lead in the Consortium and Head of Green Gases at VNG AG. 

In the remaining time before the official inauguration of the wind farm on 1 June 2024, which will be accompanied by a public information fair, the interior work and the connection of the last wind tur-bine to the grid will now be completed. 
The trial operation of the electrolyser is expected to begin in mid-2025 with the green electricity from these eight turbines, with a view to going into regular operation from the end of 2025.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The Bad Lauchstädt Energy Park is a production-scale real-life laboratory for the intelligent production of green hydrogen and its storage, transport, marketing and use. This real-life laboratory is testing the entire value chain of green hydrogen on an industrial scale for the first time. A 30 MW electrolysis plant uses renewable electricity from the nearby wind farm to produce green hydrogen. Temporarily stored in a salt cavern specially created for this purpose, the green hydrogen can be fed into the hydrogen supply network for the chemical industry in Central Germany via a converted gas pipeline and used for future urban mobility solutions. The real-life laboratory contributes to research into tomorrow’s green hydrogen technologies. bringing them to market maturity – for a technologically strong and future-oriented hydrogen-based economy in the Central Germany region and successful intersectoral energy integration throughout the Federal Republic. To this end, the project partners are investing a total of 210 million euros, which includes funding of 34 million euros from the 7th Energy Research Programme of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) as a ‘real-world laboratory for the energy transition’.