Week 2 in Hamburg entailed a lot research about the Efficiency House Plus with Electromobility, including lots of help from google translate. For those of you unfamiliar, like myself about a month ago, Efficiency House Plus with Electromobility is a new building scheme currently being pushed by the German government. Through the use of solar pv, highly efficient appliances and heating/cooling, and an impressive building envelope these houses are actually able to generate more power than their inhabitants and their inhabitants electric vehicles require! Also worth noting is that on-site battery storage and a nationwide feed-in tariff help to make use of excess generation. If project
s like these can be successful in Germany where the solar potential is only half that of the Contiguous United States, imagine the potential for us. This coupled with our nation’s reliance on the automobile and the fact that the project utilizes electric vehicles could really make for a good fit for the United States. It is a really cool project that I look forward to visiting later this month in Berlin.
Now for everything that happened outside of the office! The weather this week was warm, well, Hamburg warm, not Tampa warm. The main difference is that here 80 something degrees is not coupled with air conditioning like back home. By the time the weekend rolled around, however, rains and cooler weather had already brought temps back into the 60s and 70. The cold and constant drizzle that cooled things off before the weekend, which actually felt reminiscent of the American northwest was a welcome change from the heat, though no one in the office agreed with me. I even took that as an opportunity to further explore the district I was staying, which is really a beautiful area of Hamburg.
The highlight of the week was probably once again stumbling across yet another music festival. Taking some pictures along the Alster River I heard it. Well, technically I smelled the food first which drew me into earshot of the music. The Duckstein music festival, hosted by none other than the Duckstein Brewery. The music was surprisingly good, mostly in English too which was a pleasant surprise, accompanied by good beer, good food, and lots of it. So, I feel the need to apologize, but I think talking about food will be a common theme in my blog posts. Blame it on watching too much Bourdain, or living with a roommate that is an extreme foodie, but to me good food is worth mentioning and this festival was full of it. I started with the crepe stand which turned out to be a bit of a struggle as they understood less English than anywhere else I had been in town, but after a series of pointing, exhausting what little German I knew, and being fortunate enough to have exact change for what I wanted, I ended up with the best crepe I have ever had. By this point, 2 weeks in, I was also already craving a Hamburger and since I was in Hamburg, one of the alleged origins of the Hamburger, go figure… I had to get myself a burger. Well, it is a small world, turned out the dude running the stand was from none other than St. Pete. It kinda felt like home, eating a good burger and chatting with another American and listening to music in English. In the end the burger was good, the crepe was amazing, and I left full and happy filled with good food, beer, and music!