Star products from Germany
Products designed and made in Germany that defined their category or are used around the world, with the engineering story behind each one.
4 products
ENERCON gearless wind turbines
Onshore wind turbines without a gearbox: since the E-40 of 1993, ENERCON has driven a large-diameter generator directly from the rotor hub.
INERATEC ERA ONE
Power-to-liquid plant at Frankfurt-Höchst that turns biogenic CO2 and by-product hydrogen into up to 2,500 tonnes a year of e-SAF, e-diesel and chemical feedstocks.
Kraftblock high-temperature heat storage
Modular heat battery storing energy at up to 1,300 °C in recycled-slag granulate; replaces gas for industrial process heat at PepsiCo and recovers waste heat at Tata Steel.
SMA Sunny Boy inverter
The string inverter family for home solar systems from SMA of Niestetal, which converts direct current from solar panels into grid-ready alternating current.
Product stories
The German inside: what Germany builds into your car, your flight and the data centre
Your car may be Japanese or Italian, your airliner Airbus or Boeing. Inside both, and in the data centres behind them, sit German gearboxes, seals, bearings, chips, turbines, landing gear and racks.
Germany's strangest world champions: the small firms that quietly own odd niches
Ship propellers from a lake town, Christmas stars from a church village, the trolley sketched on a flight home. A tour of German niche champions and the stories behind them.
Inside your smartphone: the German parts nobody sees
No phone sold today carries a German brand of note, yet German sensors, liquid crystals, glass and silicon sit inside a great many of them. A walk up the supply chain, from Reutlingen to Burghausen.
Mittelstand icons: Thermomix, Playmobil, HARIBO and Steiff, and what keeps them German
Four beloved consumer brands, four family-shaped histories. Their products are global, and some are now largely made abroad. So what is German about them? Ownership, headquarters and a habit of patience.
Medtech made in Germany: scanners, ventilators, prosthetics and the lab bench
From imaging in Erlangen to anaesthesia in Lübeck, prosthetics in Duderstadt and lab equipment in Hamburg and Göttingen, German firms supply much of modern medicine's hardware.
The energy transition's hardware: turbines, inverters and electrolysers made in Germany
Wind turbines from Aurich and Rostock, solar inverters from northern Hesse, electrolysers from Dresden and grid equipment from Siemens Energy. Who builds the physical kit of decarbonisation.
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