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.
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.
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.
Warmtenetwerk Zaanstad B.V. has created the first open district heating network in the Netherlands in Zaanstad-Oost. This organization is a partnership between the municipality of Zaanstad, Firan, and the provincial authority of Noord-Holland. Thanks to the open structure, all suppliers and customers will ultimately be able to use the heating infrastructure under the same conditions. The district heating network, which has supplied heat to an existing residential district since 2019, is powered by a local small-scale biomass plant in this early phase. In the future, we will also be able to connect newly constructed homes and create links for new products, suppliers and users.
In 2003, a hydrogen strategy was developed by the Government of Aragon. Its main objective is the development of new hydrogen technologies integrated with renewable energies and the promotion of Aragon’s incorporation to economic activities related to the use of hydrogen as an energy vector. To that end, the organisation, management, and execution of a wide range of actions in order to generate, store and transport hydrogen for its use in fuel cells, in transport applications or for the generation of distributed energy is carried out. The Government of Aragon aims to encourage research, technological development, cogeneration and industrial adaptation, contributing to industrial modernisation and the improvement of competitiveness. The implantation of projects based on sustainable energies that provide technological innovation and promote the energetic and environmental sustainability are favoured. Nowadays there are 73 members of the hydrogen strategy which are part of its Board and they belong to different sectors of interest.
Over the past several years, the Northern Netherlands has accelerated its hydrogen project pipeline together with its ambitions of becoming the leading European hydrogen ecosystem. The Northern Netherlands has received recognition as the leading European Hydrogen Valley developing a full-fledged green hydrogen value chain. Furthermore, multinationals have increasingly committed to the Northern Netherlands as their hydrogen ecosystem of choice, and regional governments have increased their commitments to realize the Northern Netherlands hydrogen ecosystem.
The Brescia Province (Italy) is an area with major superficial aquifers and geological irregularity. This allows the exploitation of a geothermal source. Analysis of the results achieved by Cogeme SpA in the research of deep geothermal fluids and in the prototyping of “cold district heating” network systems allowing a rational use of groundwater for energy purposes.
Mijnwater BV stands for building a grid that is affordable for its customers, allowing them maximum opportunity to improve the energy efficiency of their own buildings, and resulting in a collective infrastructure that will further reduce energy needs. This should form a solid foundation for being sustainably financed in the long term.
Abandoned coal mines contain large volumes of water at constant temperatures (increasing with depth by 1-3 °C per 100 m), thanks to their networks of flooded galleries and shafts lying at depths of up to several hundred metres below the surface. Heat pumps can take this geothermal energy and uplift it to a more useful temperature.