One of the battles to prevent the most damaging effects of climate change by reducing CO2 emissions must be fought in our cities. In urban environments much energy potential is lost, or lies dormant, for example in waste heat and inefficient modes of transport. The City of Darmstadt is trying to tackle this problem at the root through a new initiative called DELTA (“Darmstadt Energy Laboratory for Technologies in Application”).

The aim of the initiative is to exploit the opportunities for urban energy turnaround through more sustainable resource and infrastructure management using new technologies. This means investigating the areas where energy can be saved, for example heat loss from industrial processes and from buildings, and looking at new forms of mobility, amongst other things. The researchers aim to save 14,500 tonnes of CO2 per year and increase the flexibility potential of the city’s energy system by 4.6 megawatts.

Professor Jens Schneider from the Institute of Statics and Design at the TU Darmstadt will coordinate the project with Professor Matthias Weigold from the Institute of Production Management, Technology and Machine Tools. The scientists will work with a variety of partners from industry through to community organisations. "With DELTA, we are realising a real implementation project in which science, business and society work hand-in-hand and thus create a prerequisite for the success of the energy transition," Weigold and Schneider are quoted in a press release.

“DELTA is important because it shows how actors from very different backgrounds, for example private consumers, public utilities and industrial companies can work together in the very important field of heat transition,” comments Andreas Feicht, state secretary of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), in the release. Total funding of EUR 100 million will be made available to DELTA over the next five years.