The Region Northern Hesse

The Region of Northern Hesse consists of the city and county of Kassel, as well as the counties Waldeck-Frankenberg, Schwalm-Eder, Hersfeld-Rotenburg and Werra-Meißner (see Figure 1).

Cluster region Northern Hesse, Population: 1 million 5 districts and town of Kassel Overall 45,000 companies

Figure 1: Counties and the city of Kassel in Northern Hesse

The total population sums up to one million inhabitants, of which approximately 200,000 are living in the city of Kassel, the single urban center of the region. Vast areas of the Northern Hesse Region are predominantly rural and the medium-sized regional centers comprise of not more than 30,000 inhabitants. In the coming years, negative demographic development is expected with declining population figures.

In past three decades Northern Hesse has developed in research and economy to the leading region in the area of the energy system technology for distributed, ecologically friendly and resource- saving energy systems. Renewable Energy Sources (RES) – in particular wind-, solar energy and bioenergy – form quite a special and successful main focus since the beginning of the modern technical use of RES for a modern energy supply in the 80s. As a business location, the Region of Northern Hesse is in a weaker position than the southern parts of Hesse; however, growth rates of the gross domestic product per capita are higher than for the state overall. Also the unemployment rates declined during the same period and continuously fall short of the national average. A very forward-looking project for the Northern Hesse region is the SUN project – Stadtwerke Union Northern Hesse – which is a is a consortium of six municipal energy suppliers (Bad Sooden- Allendorf, Eschwege, Homberg, Kassel, Witzenhausen and Wolfhagen) of three counties in the region. They have joined forces to expand the renewable and decentralized energy production, to increase the regional value creation and to engage people in the energy transition within the region. What they already realized is that the city of Kassel and the surrounding areas are interdependent as the rural parts may produce more energy from RES than it consumes and the city has a higher demand than production potentials but is able to absorb excess amounts of electricity (only in German: www.sun-stadtwerke.de).