Industry in XXL.

A coal-fired power plants, photovoltaic systems and a few wind turbines: The scale for cyclists' Energiepfad "leads right through the Rhenish brown coal. Technology fans discover a region of superlatives - "Think big" is the motto.

 

Grevenbroich - Huge chimneys protrude into the sky, power plants and cooling towers have the size of skyscrapers: the triangle between the cities of Cologne, Neuss and Aachen seems the motto "think big" to read. Fit to adorn the 65,000-inhabitant town Grevenbroich with the nickname "the nation's capital of energy."

Technology fans prefer the industrial buildings in the Rhineland brown coal magically to: About 38 kilometers, the marked Grevenbroicher "Energiepfad" in the places of traditional and futuristic energy along.

The especially designed for cyclists route winds past the lignite power plant Frimmersdorf on photovoltaic systems and wind power is widely visible on the Frimmersdorf height. The head in the neck must involve cyclists stopover at the site of the plant Grevenbroich-Neurath: 170-meter tower boiler and cooling towers in the sky.

2010, the plant "BoA 2 & 3" first generate electricity. Information panels along the route to report on the history and significance of the Rhenish lignite coalfield and electricity generation from brown coal, which account for about one quarter of the total electricity in Germany covers. The land around Grevenbroich, Bergheim and Jülich is the largest lignite region in Europe.

Heavy as 13,000 cars

Above 20 to 12 million years ago the lignite here from dead plants. The first time in larger quantities, it was dismantled in the 18th Century in the vicinity of Brühl near Cologne. Many data and the history of the "brown gold" to know the visitors in the castle at Paffendorf Bergheim, in which the energy company RWE Power AG since 1967, a small information center set up.

From there it's a few miles to the lookout point at the Hambach open-cast mining at Elsdorf. Here, the bucket since 1978 have nearly 400 meters into the soil and promote hineingefressen now annually nearly 40 million tons of brown coal for electricity in nearby power plants Niederaußem, Grevenbroich-Frimmersdorf and Neurath and Hürth-Knapsack.

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From the pulpit of visitors on the outskirts of the village Elsdorf angels are the tiny backhoe. They are - as apparently everything in the Rhineland brown coal - in its duration record: 96 feet high, 240 meters long and weighing 13,000 tons as difficult as some 13,000 cars. Per day can be an excavator up to 240,000 tons of lignite, or overburden promote. Overburden, which are sand, gravel or clay in which the "brown gold" stores. Many thousands of tonnes of it had the bucket in the Hambach opencast first away before it in 1984 for the first time on the lignite layer encountered.

The cleared land is next to the giant mine of Hambach aufgeschichtet and grew out of the flat land of the Jülich Börde to the artificial mountain height Sophie upwards. With 200 meters in height he makes as the world's largest artificial hill for another record in the area of Records. On the numerous trees, including many oaks, beech and alder wooded height Sophie was an extensive road network of around 100 kilometers in length.