Hamburg's Environment Senator Katharina Fegebank said a sentence several times on Monday to Tobias Goldschmidt, her Schleswig-Holstein counterpart. “Tobias, this is real.” The two Green politicians came to the Dradenau in the port of Hamburg to see the status of the new gas and steam turbine power plant of the Hamburger Energiewerke.
On the former Elbe island near the A7, it's not just about turbines, hot water and kilometers of cable. Above all, it's about the promise attached to this plant: the old Wedel coal-fired power plant is actually to be replaced. The power plant on the Elbe in Schleswig-Holstein has been running since the 1960s and has been supplying district heating primarily to the west of Hamburg since the late 1980s. It should be replaced and turned off several times.
At the end of 2026, coal burning is scheduled to end and the power plant will go into so-called conservation. Then it will only remain as a reserve and could be started up again several weeks in advance. It is scheduled to finally be shut down on July 1, 2027.
The area on the Dradenau still looks very much like a construction site. Trucks wait to be admitted in front of the entrance. Workers carry pipe parts across the area. And there is a deep shaft in the ground between the power plant and the heat storage unit connected to it. Work is underway here on the connection through which waste heat from the waste recycling plant on the nearby Rugenberger Damm will also reach Dradenau in the future.
The mood of Fegebank, Goldschmidt and Energiewerke boss Kirsten Fust is just as good as the weather on this November day with bright sunshine. The parts of the power plant that are crucial for commissioning are finished and some important tests have already been completed. At the beginning of October, one of the two gas turbines was ignited for the first time. In the meantime, their generator has been synchronized with Hamburg's 110-kilovolt power grid and electricity has been fed in for the first time.
The secondary water circuit, through which additional heat sources will later be integrated into the system, is also already in operation. By the end of the year, district heating from the new power plant is expected to flow into the Hamburg city network for the first time.
“This is really real,” says Fegebank again. After all these years, the linguistically somewhat idiosyncratic sentence is programmatic. Schleswig-Holstein has been waiting for Hamburg to replace the old coal mine in Wedel for many years. “A big part of my term in office was annoying Hamburg about Wedel,” says Goldschmidt, who has been in office since summer 2022.
The dispute over replacing the power plant was long old. There were already concrete plans to replace Wedel with another heat supplier at the beginning of the millennium. The power plant was originally scheduled to be shut down in 2013. The then owner Vattenfall planned to use heat from the new Moorburg hard coal power plant as a replacement.
In order to bring the heat from Moorburg in the south north to the parts of the city previously supplied by Wedel, a district heating pipeline was planned under the Elbe. It has been the subject of political and legal disputes for years. The line was ultimately not built. Moorburg went into operation without the planned district heating extraction to replace Wedel and was the first coal-fired power plant in Hamburg to be shut down again in 2021. A paradox because the most modern power plant went out of operation and the oldest had to continue running. In Schleswig-Holstein the anger was correspondingly great.
The fact that Hamburg operates a power plant on Schleswig-Holstein soil is a result of shifting borders. The predecessor of today's power plant was built in 1928 in what was then the municipality of Schulau, which was later incorporated into Wedel, by Elektricitätswerk Unterelbe AG. The company was based in the then independent city of Altona and, among other things, supplied Altona and larger parts of the Pinneberg district. At that time, the power plant and customers were still in the same country: Altona and Schulau belonged to the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein.
This situation only changed with the Greater Hamburg Act. Altona came to Hamburg in 1937. With Altona, Elektricitätswerk Unterelbe AG, based there, also became part of the Hamburg energy industry; Their property also included the power plant site in Schulau, Schleswig-Holstein. The Hamburg Electricity Works built today's Meiler Wedel on this site in the 1960s. The plant was built between 1961 and 1965. The power plant has also been supplying district heating since the late 1980s.
After district heating from Moorburg ended, Hamburg had to find other ways to replace the large amounts of heat from Wedel. Various solutions were worked on over the years until today's concept for the Hafen Energy Park was finally created.
Its centerpiece, the combined cycle power plant on the Dradenau, has not been spared from delays recently. Around a year ago it was announced that the new CCGT would be commissioned a few months later than planned. A few months actually turned into twelve for Wedel: District heating is mainly needed during the heating season, and the replacement for Wedel also needs to be tested under appropriate conditions. That's why the old power plant was scheduled for another winter.
The 2026/27 heating period has now begun, for which Wedel was once again planned as a hedge. At the same time, the GuD on the Dradenau is expected to feed district heating into the city network for the first time by the end of the year. If the new system runs reliably, Wedel should go into preservation and no longer burn coal. Final decommissioning is scheduled for July 1, 2027.
That's exactly why Goldschmidt's visit has symbolic significance at this point in time. It's no longer a matter of explaining another delay to your neighbor. Hamburg wants to show that the last extension announced a year ago should actually be the last.
For Goldschmidt, this is much more than a technical question of Hamburg's heat supply. Schleswig-Holstein now produces electricity from renewable energies amounting to 200 percent of its own consumption, he says. It doesn't fit that his country is also home to "Germany's oldest coal-fired power plant". With the shutdown of Wedel, Schleswig-Holstein's total CO2 emissions will fall by five to six percent, said Goldschmidt. The fact that the work on the Dradenau has reached its current status is therefore “good news”.
However, until Wedel can be switched off, numerous systems on the Dradenau must prove that they work together reliably. “We are in the final stages of commissioning and completion,” says Kirsten Fust. The gas turbines are tested gradually up to full load. At the same time, the combined cycle system, wastewater heat pump and heat storage should initially be connected in a so-called heat island operation. It will be tested whether heat generation, the integration of other heat sources as well as storage and withdrawal work together. Only then will heat be sent through the south pipe, which is already filled with water, into the Hamburg district heating network and the interaction with the overall system be tested.
The commissioning of the new system alone is a huge test program. 45 kilometers of pipes were laid for its three water circuits, plus almost 900 kilometers of cables. More than 150 systems have to work together. Around 24,000 signals are checked in a total of 48,000 signal tests.
Once this test operation has been completed, the new system must be integrated into an even larger system. Hamburg's district heating network includes around 900 kilometers of pipes in which around 85 million liters of heating water circulate. The GuD only forms part of the harbor energy park. In the future, the waste heat from several companies will converge there and be used for the district heating system. The plan is to incorporate heat from a wastewater heat pump in the neighboring sewage treatment plant as well as waste heat from ArcelorMittal and from the Rugenberger Damm waste recycling plant. The more of these heat sources can be used, the less heat has to be provided by burning gas.
Fegebank therefore describes the Hamburg energy works as a “real powerhouse of the energy transition”. The shutdown of the power plant in Wedel is the company's greatest contribution to the energy transition. And then the next Hamburg coal mine is to follow: The power plant in Tiefstack is to be shut down by 2030 at the latest and replaced by the Tiefstack Energy Park.
