EVO renews high-voltage grid between Offenbach and Heusenstamm
Offenbach – In order to be able to cover the growing energy demand in the region, Energieversorgung Offenbach (EVO) is expanding its high-voltage grid. With investments of 250 million euros over the next 15 years, the capacity is to be tripled.
After the substation in Seligenstadt had already been upgraded and a route had been laid from the substation in Dettingen in Lower Franconia under the Main to Seligenstadt, work between Heusenstamm and Offenbach began. By the middle of next year, they will cause significant traffic disruptions, particularly on the forest road.
Project manager Stefan Fels from the EVO parent company MVV Energie in Mannheim explains the details: The six-kilometer route, in which the empty pipes for the underground cables of the 110-kilovolt line are first laid, runs from the EVO substation on Friedrichsring (near the Albert -Schweitzer School) along the Waldstraße to the town hall and from there through the forest, east past the Heusenstamm campus and Heusenstamm Castle to the substation near the cemetery car park. There, barriers, stacked pipes and containers are already signs of construction work.
In the forest between the castle town and Offenbach, the detour for cyclists and pedestrians will be signposted these days. According to project manager Fels, work is being done in several places at the same time.
The four kilometers in the Offenbach district should start in July/August. From the Friedrichsring substation, the route builders swing onto the two lanes of the Waldstraße leading into town as far as the Odenwaldring, where they continue to the right of the lanes leading out of town to the Stadthalle. It is always dug and blocked in sections of 80 to 100 meters, the empty pipes are mainly laid in open construction in trenches up to two meters wide and 1.60 meters deep.
At critical points, such as when crossing the busy Odenwaldring, in the Heusenstamm Castle Park or when trees worthy of protection are affected, the so-called flush drilling method is used, in which work is carried out underground and trenches are unnecessary. The work should last a year and, according to EVO spokesman Harald Hofmann, cost 16 million euros.
As EVO Chief Technology Officer Günther Weiß reports, the high-voltage grid, which supplies almost 500,000 people and 34,000 companies, was last expanded at the end of the 1980s. The current project, in which work is being done on routes over a length of 120 kilometers, is the largest infrastructure project in the city and district of Offenbach. This includes upgrading ten substations.
At the same time, Weiß explains that in conurbations the high voltage is only laid in the form of underground cables. Overhead lines on large power poles only exist outside of densely populated areas. The regional supplier EVO receives its electricity from upstream network operators, who make the energy available at two transfer points – in Dettingen and in Urberach.
According to Weiß, the main reasons for the expansion of the high-voltage network are increasing e-mobility, the trend towards heat pumps, population growth in the city and district, demand for photovoltaics and, last but not least, the increasing energy requirements of the booming data centers, which are a basic requirement for digitization.
Günther Weiß is certain that “the energy transition we are aiming for would not work without the expansion of the grid”.
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