The phenomenological success of so-called “orbifold GUTs” have triggered renewed interest in orbifold compactifications of the heterotic string. In this talk it is shown that the concept of “local Grand Unification” facilitates the construction of significant number of models with the spectrum of the supersymmetric standard model. We find that requiring realistic features does affect the hidden sector such that hidden sector gauge group factors SU(4) and SO(8) are favoured. In the context of gaugino condensation, this implies low energy supersymmetry breaking.

TU München