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.
In 1999 Aberdeen City Council, which has some 26,500 properties, adopted a comprehensive Affordable Warmth Strategy. Since then Aberdeen has upgraded a large proportion of their housing stock. The improvements were mainly in heating systems, building fabric and levels of insulation. They have made a positive contribution to achieving local key objectives of affordability, sustainability, ensuring tenants’ safety and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
A housing co-operative in one of Scotland’s poorest regions is investing £6.5 million in a scheme to boost almost 550 households out of fuel poverty. West Whitlawburn Housing Co-operative – run by a volunteer board of 14 unpaid tenants – will connect 543 homes to a renewable biomass boiler through a district heating system. The project, part-funded with £1.5 million of Warm Homes Fund loan cash, will bring annual heat and hot water savings of around 20% to tenants.
To test new approaches that could improve the sustainability of housing in Scotland, a new heating system was developed for Slateford Green, an area consisting of 120 flats in the heart of Edinburgh. The project was developed by Dunedin Canmore Housing Association with Hackland-Dore Architects. Although the plans were very ambitious, there were various obstacles that prevented the utilization of sustainable solutions.
Municipality of Miskolc City and PannErgy Plc. decided to decrease the natural gas consumption and hazardous material emission of the city’s central heating plant with renewable energy from a geothermal source, which would ultimately ensure a cleaner and more livable city for the inhabitants of Miskolc.
The DH is located in the city of Alessandria in North-West Italy. The existing built environment is
made prevalently by apartment blocks aging from years 60-70 of 1900. A recent project aimed to increase the share of renewable and
cogenerated heat and reducing the local pollution by cleaner
plants. Two levels of temperature are created to exploit
heating in optimal way by different sources. The project has
been validated by a dynamic optimization procedure
integrated with the design.
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.
In Lund there is a high activity to demonstrate the latest solutions in many fields. One such field is to construct the largest LTDH network based on fossil fuel free waste energy. Kraftringen Energi (Lund’s energy and utility company) and its partners develop concepts for energy, mobility and lighting for the infrastructure. The construction will start in 2018 in the district of Brunnshög to become Europe’s largest LTDH facility and test field for LTDH solutions. The total development will cover 100 ha over time. This way, the city can keep growing without increasing the GHG emissions. The biomass presently used in the DH system can be used elsewhere to replace fossil fuels.
In Høje-Taastrup (Copenhagen) a project is established that will innovate, demonstrate, evaluate and disseminate technological solutions
needed to exploit and use sources of very low-grade “waste” heat for heating of energy efficient
buildings via Low Temperature District Heating (LTDH) and show how the District Heating (DH)
systems can be more resource efficient and more energy efficient. The demonstration covers both
new developments and stepwise transition of existing areas with district heating and energy
retrofitting of buildings.
The GRENOBLE-ALPES-METROPOLIS district heating, with its 170 km of liquid pressurized
water distribution pipes, is the second largest District Heating System in France (900 GWh). The
district heating is a strong part of the energy strategy of the city. The integration of renewable and recovery energy accelerates and solutions are deployed to achieve
a 100% RE District Heating in 2033. State of the art solutions (biomass, waste heat from incineration
plant, geothermal energy) are combined with innovative solution (storage, CO2 capture, smart control) .