Saving for all it’s worth
As a member of the “UmweltPartnerschaft Hamburg”, the city’s Environmental Alliance, we have been focused on a strict drive since 2007 to cut down on our energy consumption and pollutant emissions. One of the ways we’re doing this is with flywheel energy storage. Our modern U-Bahn trains feed up to 40 percent of the energy generated during braking back into the traction current network. Other U-Bahn vehicles can then re-use this energy again. And if there doesn’t happen to be a train nearby that can use the energy, it is stored instead. Thanks to our two flywheel storage systems, we save a total of up to 800,000 kilowatt hours of energy each year.
Shorter stopping times also mean that our escalators save 140,000 kWh per year. After all, if nobody is using an escalator at a particular time, there is no reason for it to be moving.
100 family households in Hamburg...
... could be supplied with the electricity that we are now set to save every year since replacing fluorescent lighting with LEDs in 2019.
400,000 kilowatt hours less electricity: that is the result of our drive in 2018 to replace lights at bus stops, in depots and works garages.