Ingolstadt, Germany, November 7, 2023.Activate turn signal, change lanes, accelerate to 130 km per hour. In a few years, autonomous vehicles are set to do all this automatically. On the A9 highway between the German cities of Munich and Ingolstadt, experts are already developing the digital chauffeur, while in the new technology park next door they are working on the future of driving. The City of Ingolstadt, via its associated company IFG AöR, and AUDI AG realize what is known as the incampus there. Where previously the towers and pipelines of the Bayernoil refinery shaped the skyline, an open campus is now being created on seventy-five hectares of nature-friendly grounds following extensive rehabilitation work. The combination of energy-efficient buildings, renewable sources, waste heat recovery and intelligent control systems will ensure that the campus generates just as much energy as it consumes. The consultancy Drees & Sommer SE, which specializes in construction and real estate, managed the development project on behalf of AUDI AG. The services provided by the company included advise on green building aspects, quality assurance for the data center and implementation of the testbeds and crash facilities. The first building phase has been completed now.
The centerpiece of the newly-developed site is the vehicle safety center, which has its own crash arena, dummy laboratory, testbeds, workshops and offices. The first construction phase also includes a project center, in which 1,400 developers from partner firms and startups are researching sustainable mobility. All this requires secure IT infrastructure and a lot of storage for software and data. The energy needed for the IT systems is supplied by the campus’s own data center, which houses 800 servers and data cabinets.
From Disused Industrial Wasteland to Creative Think Tank
The rehabilitation of the incampus site is one of the biggest soil rehabilitation projects in Germany, and the first comprehensive rehabilitation of a refinery site in Bavaria. Bayernoil had been refining crude oil on the site for more than 40 years. This left its mark on nature: the water and the soil had been contaminated by waste oil and a variety of chemicals. “We tested for a wide variety of contamination parameters in more than 50,000 laboratory analyses,” says Dr.-Ing. Christof Messner, Managing Director at Audi’s IN-Campus GmbH, a joint venture of the City of Ingolstadt and AUDI AG. Nine hundred metric tons of fuel oil, 200 metric tons of benzene and 100 kilograms of toxic per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) were found in the fire-extinguishing foam of the former plant fire department, among other issues.
“We excavated and washed more than 600,000 cubic meters of earth to remove contaminants. This was a success: after this process we were able to return more than 90 percent of the material, and the rest was disposed of appropriately.”
This extensive environmental rehabilitation of a brownfield site is one of the biggest of its kind to be carried out in Germany – and it could be a model for other construction projects. Many clients continue to favor greenfield sites for their projects. Progress is usually quicker, as the additional regulatory requirements do not apply, and opting for a greenfield site avoids the hassle and expense of detailed geological surveys. However, when it comes to conserving unsealed soils in natural settings, which is so important, brownfield sites with existing technical infrastructure score highly. They are also generally well connected to the surrounding regions.
“Brownfield developers following the example of Audi and the city of Ingolstadt are taking on a great responsibility for upgrading sealed surfaces and making them available for use again. They have to be supported in this,” points out Mustafa Kösebay, Board Member of the German Brownfield Association (DEBV) and Associate Partner at Drees & Sommer. He is calling for a bonus system for rehabilitation works, along with accelerated building permit procedures, and grants for the redevelopment of brownfield sites in cities and municipalities to mitigate the consumption of land. However, Audi and the city of Ingolstadt are going a step further as far as nature conservation is concerned. On 15 hectares in the northern and eastern areas of the site, adjoining the floodplain of the Danube river, nature will be allowed to flourish again and provide a new habitat for the animal and plant world.
The Internet Warms the Buildings
The incampus construction project is not only setting standards for environmentally-friendly rehabilitation work. The buildings are currently still obtaining their electricity and district heating externally, but the medium-term plan is for incampus to become a zero-energy campus, and for this reason the energy system is of modular design. It consists of photovoltaic systems, reversible heat pumps and extensive planting, and will use heat recovered from the campus data center
And this is how it works in detail: the servers in the data center heat up during operation and need to be constantly cooled. This process creates heat, which is fed into what is referred to as a low-exergy network. This uses low-temperature heat to provide heating or cooling as required for the entire campus. A thermal energy storage system with a storage capacity of around 3,000 cubic meters improves the energy efficiency even further. “Combinations of these modules allow CO2 emissions to be effectively reduced and valuable resources conserved. This is an essential element for green building certification,” explains Drees & Sommer’s project head Mathias Schultheiß. Together with Simon Rogalski he is also responsible for overall management of the campus project. An interdisciplinary team of about 12 Drees & Sommer project management experts is working for Audi.
Together Ensuring Smooth Processes on the Construction Site
The Drees & Sommer team also provided support for the building of the vehicle safety center. At the heart of the safety center is the crash arena, an unsupported area measuring 50 by 50 meters, in which a wide variety of crash situations are tested. Drees & Sommer’s integrated factory design experts supervised the technical implementation and acceptance of the crash and testbed technology. This included quality assurance in relation to the commissioning and acceptance processes carried out by the external technical designers, coordination and examination of the commissioning and acceptance documents, and making acceptance and approval recommendations for the divisional heads of Audi.
“Generally speaking, we ensure that processes on large-scale construction sites run smoothly. We coordinate hundreds of project participants, monitor construction progress and enable the individual trades to work rapidly and efficiently,” says Mathias Schuldheiß. On September 15, the first construction phase was concluded with a ceremony’.