East Port business park to become part of a green hub

Twelve private and public enterprises in North Jutland have drafted an ambitious plan for Aalborg to be a national test centre for green, sustainable technologies, making it an important instrument for achieving the Danish Climate Act’s target of a 70% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030. The partners behind the initiative, which include Port of Aalborg, Aalborg University, Aalborg Forsyning and the Municipality of Aalborg, have now raised almost five billion Danish kroner for Green Hub Denmark, a project that brings together the business sector, 400 energy researchers, public authorities and consumers in a large-scale testing ground.

Two of the five billion kroner will be spent on Port of Aalborg’s business park at the East Port. The investments will be used to develop tomorrow’s green business park. And having parcelled out an area of 140,000 square metres to create impetus for an innovative business park focusing on industrial symbioses, Port of Aalborg is already well underway:

‘We’re proud to be able to contribute to a project as ambitious as Green Hub Denmark. Not only will it make our society greener and more sustainable, it’s expected to generate up to 5,000 new jobs over the next ten years,’ says Claus Holstein, CEO of Port of Aalborg, and he adds:

‘Our role will be to develop a concept for how to run a business park in a new way, focusing on symbioses and collaboration. It’s partly about attracting the right companies and placing them strategically in relation to one another, in order to create the right conditions for the flow of resources – such as heat, electricity, cooling and waste management – between them. If we use our resources more appropriately, it will not only be good for the environment, it will unquestionably also benefit the economies of the individual businesses.’

Claus Holstein points out that Port of Aalborg already has a strong green agenda. For many years, the port has both launched and participated in a range of projects promoting sustainability. One such project is Miljø++ whose aim is to develop concepts to turn the East Port into an incubator for sustainable solutions and business models.

Furthermore, in recent years in particular, Port of Aalborg has invested heavily in a number of companies at the East Port that employ green solutions and technologies.

‘Our job is to provide a good foundation for innovative businesses offering products and solutions that promote sustainability, to ensure that they develop and flourish at the port. For instance, our most recent investment is a new factory building for Blue World Technologies, a company that designs green drivetrains for vehicles,’ says Claus Holstein, and he adds:

‘We’ve also recently invested in a new test facility for BLAEST, a company making a living from testing wind turbine blades, and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has improved its test facilities at the East Port. All of this strongly underlines the fact that Aalborg has the largest concentration of test facilities for wind turbine blades in the world. It’s a highly interesting environment and we’d very much like to develop it further, to ensure that Aalborg becomes a hub or industrial cluster for businesses that test wind turbines.’

The partners behind Green Hub Denmark are:

• Municipality of Aalborg
• Port of Aalborg
• Aalborg University
• DI Aalborg
• Erhverv Norddanmark – Chamber of Commerce
• ErhvervsNetværk 9220
• Aalborg Forsyning