An old painted tank farm becomes a symbol of climate protection: Offenburg and Burda convert industrial land into a modern heat pump power plant. District heating, waste heat and renewable energy will make city centers climate neutral by 2040.
Offenburg provides an example of how this can be achieved. The city of Baden-Württemberg wants to supply its entire city center with regeneratively generated district heating by 2040. This technical-sounding thing is actually a major climate protection project – and a prime example of successful cooperation between society and business.
Tradition meets transformation
Heat Supply Offenburg (WVO) and media company Burda have been working together since 2017. First step: Waste heat from the old Burda printing plant is channeled into the city’s heating network – instead of being discharged outside and unused. (FOCUS online is part of the digital publisher BurdaForward, which is owned by Hubert Burda Media.)
The next stage begins with the closure of the printing factory. Since the end of 2023, a modern heat pump power plant has been built on the site of an old paint tank at the Burda site, operated with electricity from renewable energy, including wind power. This technology intelligently exploits daily electricity price fluctuations to generate, distribute and store heat efficiently and flexibly.
“The extraordinary result of this collaboration is that waste heat from the printing process is not wasted,” explains Elisabeth Burda Furtwängler, partner of Burda Verlag. “At the same time, we are able to transform existing infrastructure – such as former paint tank fields – into new, environmentally friendly infrastructure.”
Burda as a heat transition engine
Another technical milestone was the connection of the district heating network at the Offenburg trade fair. The two networks could be combined at the Burda site in 2023/2024 – laying the foundation for a future climate neutral city centre.
“Without cooperation with Burda, the successful development of Offenburg’s heat supply would not have been possible,” emphasize WVO managing directors Martin Wenz and Christian Linz. Mayor Marco Steffens also praised the “close relationship between the Burda family and their city.”
The new power plant will supply around 15 million kilowatt-hours of heat in the future – more than a third of the total district heating volume in Offenburg. The city is investing around 250 million euros in the warming transition by 2040. “I am pleased that we can contribute to the future at our headquarters through this cooperation,” said publisher Hubert Burda.
District heating as the backbone of the urban heating transition
Since 2023, the Building Energy Act (GEG) has required cities to create concrete heating plans. District heating plays an important role in this. It uses waste heat from industry, data centers or power plants and combines it with renewable sources such as solar thermal energy or heat pumps. In a shared network, these energy sources can be combined, controlled and provided efficiently on a large scale – something individual heaters cannot achieve.
