UNDERSTANDING THE ENERGY TRANSITION, MADE VISIBLE

ENERGIE – WAS UNS BEWEGT — CITY OF JENA

How does a city make its own energy transition tangible as something you can walk through, touch, and test? As part of JenErgieReal, the City of Jena's living lab for the energy transition, the EnergieLabor was created as a permanent home for this question. And within it, the exhibition ENERGIE – WAS UNS BEWEGT. We designed and developed its interactive stations.

Energy transformation is complex by nature: networks within networks, where electricity, heat, storage, and data all depend on one another in real time. We worked closely with the experts behind JenErgieReal to understand the city's energy systems from the inside: grids, virtual power plants, sector coupling. Then we translated that knowledge into interactive stations visitors can explore at their own pace, turning abstract data into image, and policy into something you navigate with your own hands.

JenErgieReal itself is a federally-funded living lab for the energy transition, developing solutions for how Germany's Energiewende can succeed in cities - affordably and on demand. At its core is a virtual power plant that connects and intelligently controls the generation, storage, and consumption of electricity and heat, tested in a model neighborhood at Salvador-Allende-Platz ion Jena. The project brings together utilities, network operators, housing associations, universities, and the City of Jena itself - an interdisciplinary alliance working to turn Jena into a blueprint for the urban energy transition.