Something stood here before, and something is coming here again. For decades, Philippsburg has been an energy location for the whole of Baden-Württemberg: nuclear power, now the ULTRANET converter, soon one of the largest battery storage systems in Germany, in the longer term green hydrogen, and now, with engrida, digital infrastructure on a scale of national importance as well. In Philippsburg we are used to big things, but this tops everything. We are shaping our structural change ourselves instead of waiting for others to shape it for us. With engrida, we are getting back some of the jobs and added value we lost when Goodyear closed: skilled, future-proof, with sustainable trade tax revenue. We are using industrial land that we already have instead of sealing new green spaces. And one thing is particularly close to my heart: in Germany, the heating transition has not really even started yet. Here we can make it tangible. In future, the waste heat from this campus is to arrive in Philippsburg living rooms, and we would like to explore carefully in what form our neighbouring municipalities on the northern Upper Rhine can benefit from it too. Dear citizens, dear colleagues in the neighbouring municipalities, dear region: let’s get going. We are doing this together: as equals, at pace and, above all, on our own terms.

The Wirth Gruppe is a family business with deep regional roots, based in Waghäusel, a few kilometres from Philippsburg. We are not investing here from outside, but in our own home region, and with a horizon spanning generations. engrida is more than a data centre project: we are combining energy, grid and data into an integrated platform, making use of one of the most valuable infrastructures Germany has: the existing 380 kV connection at the former KKP site. From an economic point of view, it would hardly be justifiable not to make this extra-high-voltage infrastructure usable for our country’s digital sovereignty. We are doing this on a brownfield site, with waste heat use for the region and in genuine partnership with the town of Philippsburg and its citizens. We have owned the site for more than seven years, and it has always been clear to us: there is no better one. In Mayor Stefan Martus and the Philippsburg municipal council, we have partners at our side of the kind one can only wish for in Germany for a project of this scale. We expressly thank them for this.

By connecting this first data centre to TransnetBW’s extra-high-voltage grid, we are reaching an important milestone: we are bringing new digital infrastructure onto the grid and thereby creating a key prerequisite for value creation and future viability in the Philippsburg region. At the same time, we see that the number of grid connection requests is currently rising sharply, especially for battery storage systems and data centres. This shows how great the demand is, but it also makes clear: for available grid capacity to be allocated fairly, transparently and in a way that serves the system, clear rules are needed. The new maturity-level procedure of the four transmission system operators in Germany is an important step towards exactly that. It assesses applications not on a first-come, first-served basis, but according to comprehensible criteria and their actual readiness for implementation.