Despite its small size, the solar district heating system in Lodi, close to Milan, is one of few in Italy to feed surplus heat into a local network. Since March 2017, heat produced by a 192 m² solar thermal installation is used as a heating source.
In the city of Helsingborg in Sweden, the municipal energy company Öresundskraft supplies District Cooling to a variety of customers in the downtown area. Customers include large users such as a pharmaceutical production facility and a major hospital together with an array of offices and other commercial buildings. The system that has been in operation since 1999 has now been reengineered to allow for an expansion to 30 MW (thermal) cooling capacity and to significantly improve energy efficiency and environmental performance.
In the municipality of Kirchweidach in Germany, since 2013 vegetables are being produced sustainably and residents are supplied with renewable heat and electricity based on deep geothermal energy. The biggest customer of the geothermal heat is a vegetable growing company using a 12 hectare large green house, cultivating regional peppers and tomatoes. This project is a unique flagship in terms of sustainability and environmental heat utilization strengthening the regional economy and location of the municipality in many ways.
The DH System of Bolzano in South Tyrol (northern Italy) was initiated in 1986 in order to satisfy a social housing district’s need for heat. From the end of the 1990 years began expansion, optimisation and from 2008 took place a massive expansion, made possible through the construction of a new waste incineration plant. Thus, a strong reduction of CO2 emission was possible despite a massive expansion of the network.
Assens Fjernvarme (Denmark) has supplemented their existing wood chip combined heat and power plant and an existing wind turbine with a solar cell system and an air to water heat pump system. This unique combination of renewable energy sources makes it possible to combine a low price for heat consumers with the production of green electricity when the electricity market needs electricity and purchase electricity from the electricity grid when there is a surplus of green electricity in the grid.
In Denmark, the first world-wide demonstration of a new concept of an efficient district heating system for low-energy buildings is established. The goal is to reduce district heating temperature
delivered to consumers to 50°C. In total, 122 sustainable climate friendly public houses are built.
The first Italian Hydrogen Valley will be built near Rome, at the ENEA Casaccia Research Center, and will take care of the energy vector at 360 degrees to shorten the distance that currently separates the most promising innovations from large-scale production. The project conceived by ENEA was born with an investment of 14 million euros (Mission Innovation funds) to create the first Italian technological incubator for the development of the hydrogen supply chain that takes care of the entire nascent supply chain (from production to distribution, from accumulation to use) in collaboration with universities, research institutes, associations and companies, with the aim of promoting the energy transition and decarbonisation.
Companies, Universities and NGOs are working together to green the Lombardian economy! A2A Calore e Servizi, Alfa Acciai, University of Brescia and DHPlanet have pursued the common goal of creating an innovative and efficient system for the recovery of energy from industrial thermal waste, deriving from the Alfa Acciai production site, in order to contribute to the supply of the district heating network already serving the city of Brescia.
As part of the decarbonization project of the Brescia city energy system promoted by A2A (Italian multi-utility, operating in the environment, energy, heat, grids and technologies for smart cities sectors. District heating operator), which will make the city “Carbon Free”, there are two important circular economy projects that see heat recovery as the protagonist from production plants, specifically from steel mills.
Turboden will design and install an innovative industrial heat pump (Large Heat Pump) of about 5-7 MWth at the ORI Martin steel plant, through which it will be possible to increase (with the addition of electricity) the waste heat coming from the waste thermal low temperature of the steel plant from around 70 ° C to 120 ° C, the optimum temperature to then transfer it to the A2A district heating network.