After 20 years investing in renewable energy, the small Austrian town of Guessing, a model of energy self-sufficiency, is spreading its pioneering technology far and wide.
A town of 4,300 inhabitants near the Hungarian border, Guessing launched into renewable energy in the early 1990s and now produces more than it can consume.
The latest project, opened last week, is a one-megawatt plant capable of producing gas from wood chips.
PHOTO: AFP
According to its backers, this gas can be used in normal gas networks, urban heating systems, and cars or power stations that work on gas.
The technology, developed jointly with Switzerland, has already attracted attention from major energy companies.
“Vattenfall [from Sweden], EDF [France] and E.ON [Germany] are all interested in the plant,” Guessing Mayor Peter Vadasz said proudly.
A similar plant to the one in Guessing — which can heat 150 homes on a cold winter’s day — but 25 times more powerful is already in the works in Goeteborg, Sweden.
About 20 years ago, Guessing was still a sleepy town in the eastern Austrian province of Burgenland, but its foray into renewable energy soon turned it into a pioneer.
Located in a region of crop fields and forests, Guessing used its assets — biomass and sunshine — to pull itself out of its economic stagnation. Since 1996, this project has been coordinated by the European Center for Renewable Energy (EEE) and cofinanced by the EU.
After discarding wind power for lack of breezes, researchers developed a number of techniques to produce heat, electricity and agrofuel using maize, rapeseed, agricultural waste, wood or sunshine.
Guessing now covers all its heating and electricity needs thanks to a network of small units with a total capacity of six megawatts. And since 2005, the small town has been producing more energy than it can use.
“We produce 120 million kilowatt-hours of heating every year, and 45 million kilowatt-hours of electricity,” EEE director Reinhard Koch said.
Sales of electricity also brought in 6.7 million euros (US$9.4 million) last year.
“A total 1,100 jobs have been created in the last 12 years,” said Vadasz, who has won every re-election since 1992.
“Since the price of heating is determined by the town, we’ve been able to incite companies financially to settle down here. We have re-invested to renew the town,” he said.
Guessing’s model, which is partly based on its ability to export its innovative technologies, has not been spared by the global economic crisis: one company specialized in photovoltaics — solar cells — is due to sack half its employees due to a drop in demand.
But the small town’s ideas have nevertheless spread in the surrounding area.
The surrounding country, whose total population is 28,000, hopes to become energy self-sufficient by the end of next year with the development of several dozen more small power plants if the government passes a law proposal providing incentives, said Koch.
That would cut carbon dioxide emissions in the district by 85 percent, he said.
Guessing’s model has also raised interest farther afield and in early May, Vadasz presented his town’s model to the UN in Vienna.
“Sri Lanka’s environment minister is coming to visit us,” the mayor said proudly.
Researchers, meanwhile, are already looking for new energy sources. After gas, they now hope to produce diesel and gasoline from wood.
The aim is to create an agrofuel that will not endanger food production. First experiments will be held in a few months time.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts