Bio-Energy Village in the Black Forest

We will visit a Black Forest community, which produces three times as much electricity from renewable energy sources than the 4,200 inhabitants consume. The surplus electricity feeds into the grid.

We visit a farm of 80 hectares, which following the BSE, or “mad cow disease“, crisis in 2000, abandoned cattle and pig breeding due to declining meat prices to become a pioneer in biogas production. Today, the farmer supplies a small settlement, the school and spa house with a swimming pool with heat from his own cogeneration plant and feeds about 1 million kWh of electricity into the power line.

This tour will then take you to an organic family farm. The farm has 50 dairy cows that graze on 20 hectares in the summer. In winter they are fed hay. There is no silage. This allows the production of high quality organic “hay milk”. 1/3 of this production remains on the farm for their cheese factory where they produce hay milk cheese. In addition, this organic farm is using renewable energies: heat recovery from the milk during cooling, photovoltaic modules that are used to dry the hay, and a wood chip boiler.

To conclude this excursion, we will visit two different large-scale citizen-owned wind power plants and their financing model will be presented.

If anyone is hungry after recieving so much information, you can satisfy this hunger and thirst in the historic Black Forest mill which uses local and regional products (not included in the price).

Group rate: 516€ (up to 30 people)

Duration: approx. 4.5 hours