Rather than burn our future, we have chosen to use climate-friendly heating in our buildings. To promote this heat shift, we are working on various ideas and measures. Basically, when oil-fired heating systems reach the end of their life cycle, we do not simply replace them, but we put climate neutral alternatives into operation instead. We are creating heating concepts for our top fifty sites and converting the existing systems accordingly. Attractive alternatives to systems that burn fossil fuels include heat pumps and biomass systems.
Green heating systems for climate-friendly heat
At many sites, we are already saving a great deal of CO2 with alternative heating systems. At the Munich-Pasing maintenance depot, for example, we have been using geothermal energy since 2017. Combined heat and power (CHP) plants offer another alternative, cogenerating both electricity and heat at once. We have installed CHP systems at the Baden-Baden, Dessau and Friedrichshafen stations.
At Mühldorf in Bavaria, a DB RegioNetz maintenance facility is partly heated with wood chippings. These chippings are produced when we cut back the vegetation on either side of our rail lines. We are switching other sites to environmentally sustainable district heating, as has been done at the Berlin-Rummelsburg depot.
