The view from the conference room on the top floor of the trade fair tower falls on the roofs of the halls.

Solar panels can be seen on some, but by no means all.

There will also be no photovoltaic system on the roof of the new, almost finished Hall 5 next to the Festhalle.

Patricia Andreae

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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That's because of the neighbors, says Uwe Behm, who is responsible for the buildings on the management board of the trade fair.

"We're surrounded by office buildings and there would have been glare from the sun's reflection, so no system was approved for the roof," he explains.

Instead, the roof will now be greened to at least make a contribution to climate friendliness.

The goal: climate-neutral by 2040

The example shows how difficult it can be for a company like Messe Frankfurt to meet the climate goals that it has set itself, but which the state, federal government and EU also demand.

"The pressure is high," says Behm, because customers and even employees are now increasingly pushing for low carbon emissions.

The trade fair industry wants to be climate-neutral by 2040.

By 2025 at the latest, all German trade fairs should be supplied with 100 percent green electricity.

And although the companies are only just slowly returning to normal operations after the difficult years of the pandemic, they want to make sustainability a requirement in tenders from next year.

However, as Behm reports, this is increasingly being demanded by trade fair participants and congress organizers.

The 69 organizers, associations and hosts organized in the umbrella organization of the German trade fair industry Auma have given themselves a nine-point plan for sustainability from A for waste to W for water.

3000 electricity meters installed

Messe Frankfurt sees itself on the right track.

"And not just since yesterday," says Behm, having piled up stacks of reports in front of him to prove it.

An annual energy monitor has been produced for the company since 2007.

The focus is on the Frankfurt location, because at other locations, especially foreign locations, where the trade fair does not own the site, monitoring is often difficult.

Electricity meters were first installed in Frankfurt, a total of 3,000 units.

Only with their help can it be determined exactly where and how much energy is consumed.

In this way, it has been possible to reduce the base load by 30 percent over the past 15 years.

This applies to the energy that is also consumed when no trade fair is taking place, because data centers, emergency lighting and air conditioning must always be running.

Water consumption is also not at its highest when thousands of visitors use the washrooms;

but on those days when nothing is happening: "Because of the risk of legionella, we have to flush the lines regularly," reports Behm.

The Frankfurt trade fair association has long met the criteria for electricity consumption.

In 2020, the trade fair switched to 100 percent green electricity at its home location.

This leads to annual savings of around 19,000 tons of CO2.

The three photovoltaic systems on the site, which generated around 2.4 gigawatt hours of solar power (2021), covered eight to ten percent of the base load and thus saved around 1200 tons a year.

It is currently being checked whether the roof of Hall 8 is suitable for another system.