Starting in 2024, Deutsche Bahn will be powered by electricity from the Amrumbank West offshore wind farm of RWE Renewables.
The related Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) was signed by Deutsche Bahn and RWE Supply & Trading, RWE’s trading subsidiary. The PPA will begin in 2024 and will continue until 2039.
Deutsche Bahn is also Germany’s largest consumer of green energy. By 2038, all the electricity delivered to Deutsche Bahn trains will come from 100 percent renewables; the rate is currently 61 percent.
Green energy from RWE will make a crucial contribution to this. Since 2014, the company has delivered approximately 880 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of green electricity per year to Deutsche Bahn from their hydropower stations. In 2019, RWE closed the PPA with Deutsche Bahn to supply electricity from its Nordsee Ost offshore wind farm, also near Heligoland.
“We were already supplying Deutsche Bahn with green electricity today. This additional agreement will help our long-standing partner to achieve their ambitious climate protection goals. We are increasingly supplying and shaping green electricity for our industrial customers in Europe.”
Andree Stracke, managing director of RWE supply & trading.
Amrumbank West is situated approximately 30 kilometers off the coast of Heligoland and has a total of 80 installed 288 megawatt wind turbines. It’s been in service since 2015.
The supply volume to Deutsche Bahn includes the power of 18 wind turbines or approximately one quarter of the annual generation capacity of the offshore wind farm. That’s around 260 GWh in total. This is enough to provide about 300,000 households with renewable energy per year.
