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  Business Times 31 Aug 07
At the edge of a greener frontier
The Austrian town of Gussing is the first in the EU to cut carbon emissions by over 90%
By Jonathan Tirone

FOR decades, the Austrian town of Gussing was a forgotten outpost, 16 kilometres from the rusting barbed-wire border of the Iron Curtain. Now, it's at the edge of a greener frontier: alternative energy.

Gussing is the first community in the European Union to cut carbon emissions by more than 90 per cent, helping it attract a steady stream of scientists, politicians and eco-tourists.

'This was a dead-end town and now we're the centre of attention,' says Maria Hofer, 55, a lifelong resident, as she buys organic vegetables at a farmer's market. 'It seems like every week we read about new jobs from renewable energy.'

Gussing's transformation started 15 years ago when, struggling to pay its electricity bill, the town ordered that all public buildings stop using fossil fuels.

Since then, Gussing has spawned a whole renewable energy industry, with 50 companies creating more than 1,000 jobs and producing heat, power and fuel from the sun, sawdust, corn and cooking oil.

Signs reading 'Eco-Energy Land' greet people entering the town, located 130 kilometres south-east of Vienna. Visitors are as diverse as Scottish farmers, Japanese investors and a delegation from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

'The town is combining growth in tourism revenue with being in the vanguard of environmental sustainability,' says Bernard Snoy, economic director at the Vienna-based OSCE, who brought a group of 50 diplomats from 30 countries to Gussing in June.

Gussing used to rely on agriculture, with farmers selling their corn, sunflower oil and timber. As for tourism, the main attraction was a 12th-century castle built by Hungarian nobles.

The town could hardly afford its six million euro (S$12.44 million) fuel bill when Peter Vadasz, 63, was first elected mayor in 1992.

The turnaround started after he hired Rheinhard Koch, 46, an electrical engineer and Gussing native, to assess how the town of 4,000 people could benefit from its natural resources.

Today, Gussing generates 22 megawatt hours of power a year, including an eight megawatt surplus that is sold to the national grid, says Mr Koch, who now runs the European Centre for Renewable Energy, based in the town and funded by Gussing, the EU and the Austrian government.

Sales of excess power generate about 4.7 million euros in annual revenue and a 500,000-euro profit that is ploughed back into alternative energy projects.

'Just to turn to renewable energy brought advantages we didn't dream of before,' says Mr Vadasz, a former schoolteacher. 'A lot of money that left before, now stays in the region.'

Gussing began building its energy network in 1992 with a wood-burning plant that provided heat for 27 homes. The second step was a facility that made car fuel from rapeseed.

By 1996, Gussing had started to generate electricity and expanded its heating system to the whole town.

The breakthrough came in 1998, when Mr Koch and Mr Vadasz saw a presentation by Viennese scientist Hermann Hofbauer about a technology he had developed to make synthetic fuel from wood.

They asked Prof Hofbauer and Vienna's Technical University to build a pilot project. A local company later licensed the technology, which uses steam to separate carbon and hydrogen from scrap lumber, then recombines the molecules to make a form of natural gas. The gas in turn fuels the city's power plant.

Gussing has reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by 93 per cent from 1995 levels, according to the renewable energy centre.

Sole leader Vaxjo, the Swedish town that won the EU's 'Sustainable Community' award this year, has cut emissions by 25 per cent during the past decade.

Former United States vice-president Al Gore last month called for 90 per cent cuts worldwide by 2050.

The European Environment Agency, which tracks renewable energy projects in the 27-member EU, doesn't know of any other town that has achieved similar reductions in carbon emissions, says Copenhagen-based spokesman Brendan Killeen.

Still, Gussing must protect the surrounding forest land to maintain its supply of renewable energy, says Raphael Rindler, a Franciscan priest who has preached in the town for four years.

'People here take the forests for granted, the way people thought about oil 50 years ago.' He says that he's more hopeful about the solar power that would start being produced in Gussing next year when Germany's Solon AG Fuer Solartechnik finishes its 50 million euro plant.

Meanwhile, Gussing is preparing for more tourism, building new sidewalks and widening the road to include parking spaces.

Eco hotel guests stay in hotels such as the 60 euro-a-night Com.Inn, with its simple, unpolished steel furniture. Gussing's 30 kilometres of thermal heating ducts feed warmth into the rooms, where wall -sized windows overlook a blue box that houses its own electric generator powered by Prof Hofbauer's technology.

'Everybody lives from renewable energy here,' says Elisabeth Astl, 42, a manager at the hotel. 'There's more tourism now that we use it.'

Mr Vadasz, an ethnic Hungarian who will run for a fourth term in October, expects that record oil prices and increasing dependence on imported Russian gas would drive more people to look for the kind of energy security his town has achieved.

'People here feel less vulnerable because they know their energy's coming from renewable sources and not imports,' Mr Vadasz says. 'This should be the top priority of anyone who goes into politics, anywhere in the world.' - Bloomberg
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