Time and again, passers-by stop in front of the lantern on Ottobrunn’s town hall square and look a little surprised at the two lights, which bathe the square in a completely different light than all the other lanterns around – and much brighter. In the future, the entire center of Ottobrunn around the town hall and the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus will be illuminated in this way, and with significantly less energy consumption. “The light beam is more economical and is reduced to 30 percent of the current output,” explained Ottobrunn Mayor Thomas Loderer (CSU) on Monday evening at the meeting of the municipal council’s building committee.
The municipality is therefore converting to LEDs – but this will not be the only energy-saving measure in Ottobrunn, because the town hall, the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus and the elementary school on Friedenstrasse are now to be connected to the district heating network of Stadtwerke München as quickly as possible.
As many households as possible should be connected
For years, the community has been waiting for a corresponding offer from the Munich public utility company to connect the town center to geothermal energy. In particular, the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus and the town hall, which were built in the 1970s and 1980s, are showing their age and now have an extremely dilapidated heat supply. A mobile heating station is currently running there because the existing gas burner is defective, and the old oil burner is also a few years old and – in addition to the questionable energy balance – is extremely maintenance-intensive and costly. And the so-called single-boiler system at the elementary school on Friedenstraße is already two decades old.
“We are therefore very happy that the offer from the public utility company has come,” said City Hall boss Loderer, who also held the energy supplier, who has been responsible for the entire district heating network of the community for several years, responsible. According to Loderer, the goal must be to connect as many households as possible in the town center. It could prove to be an advantage that the municipality itself took a look at the potential two years ago with a survey of residents, homeowners and house managers. “And the response was really good at the time,” said the mayor.
In the next two years, the previously separate networks in the west and east of the S-Bahn route are to be connected, but this will require considerable structural intervention. Because the ring closure is to take place with the laying of pipes at the two S-Bahn crossings on Putzbrunner and Ottostrasse when Deutsche Bahn tackles the renovation of the technology there. These measures will also result in severe impairments in local public transport over a longer period of time, as the tracks of the S-Bahn will also have to be renewed over a length of several kilometers.
In the future, according to Loderer, the goal is to completely connect the eastern part of the community to the district heating network. The Hanns-Seidel-Haus, the high school and the fire brigade there are already supplied with geothermal energy. In the west, there are lines at Haidgraben, for example, with which the Isar Center, the adult education center and the police will go online. According to Loderer, when all the measures now being considered have been completed, district heating will account for around 23 percent of the total heat supply in Ottobrunn – as high as in Ismaning, Aschheim or Unterschleißheim.