Finding new solutions for clean and efficient energy in our cities is an increasing priority within the European Union. COOL DH is proud to be one of the projects leading the way to a more sustainable future, together with a width of projects within the European Union. Below is an overview of some of the projects that are related to COOL DH.
LowUP stands for Low valued energy sources UPgrading for buildings and industry uses. The project is developing and demonstrating three new efficient heating and cooling technologies that will significantly reduce both CO2 emissions and primary energy consumption.
Heating and cooling refers to the energy needed to warm and cool buildings, both residential and tertiary (i.e. office buildings, hospitals etc.) and includes the energy needed in nearly all industrial processes to manufacture products that we use every day. Led by the Spanish firm ACCIONA, LowUP gathers 13 partners from 7 European countries.
District heating and cooling systems (DHCS) need to be more efficient, intelligent and cheaper. The target of InDeal is to turn the current DHCS into a new next-level automated DHCS that will guarantee the increase of the overall energy efficiency of the system accomplishing a fairly distribution of heating and cooling energy demands. In light of this, InDeal will make a significant step forward contributing to wider use of intelligent district heating and cooling systems and integration of renewables, waste and storage.
The TEMPO – Temperature Optimisation for Low Temperature District Heating across Europe – project develops technical innovations that enables district heating networks to operate at lower temperatures. By decreasing the temperature in the systems, it reduces heat losses and allows a higher share of renewable and excess heat to be used as heat sources. The use of these heat sources will be crucial to adapt current district heating systems and create new ones suitable for a sustainable energy system.
Six technological innovations that contribute to minimising the temperature in networks and enables a cost-efficient implementation of low temperature networks will undergo final development in TEMPO.
Renewable Low Temperature District (RELaTED) will provide an innovative ultra-low temperature concept for thermal district energy networks with lower costs, fewer heat losses, better energy performance and more extensive use of de-carbonized energy sources than actual district heating concept. The main objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept in European urban environments, and its suitability for the upcoming operational environment with reduced heat loads and distributed heat sources. To prove this, the concept will be demonstrated in four real demonstrations sites (Denmark, Estonia, Serbia and Spain), with two additional feasibility studies. However, some technologies must be adapted to the particularities of the system.
THERMOS (Thermal Energy Resource Modelling and Optimisation System) is an EU Horizon 2020 funded research project that will develop the methods, data, and tools to enable public authorities and other stakeholders to undertake more sophisticated thermal energy system planning, far more rapidly and cheaply than they can today. This will amplify and accelerate the development of new low carbon heating and cooling systems across Europe, and enable faster upgrade, refurbishment and expansion of existing systems.
Heat Roadmap Europe
Heat Roadmap Europe is mapping and modelling the heating and energy systems of the 14 largest users of heat in the EU (covering 85-90% of the heating and cooling demands in Europe), to develop new policies at the local, national, and EU level to ensure the uptake of efficient, sustainable and affordable heating and cooling solutions.
Traditionally, district Heating and Cooling (DHC) networks distribute energy from a centralized generation plant to a number of remote customers. As such, actual DHC systems are affected by relevant heat losses and unexplored integration potential of different available energy sources into the network. FLEXYNETS will develop, demonstrate and deploy a new generation of intelligent DHC networks that reduce energy transportation losses by working at “neutral” (15-20°C) temperature levels. Reversible heat pumps will be used to exchange heat with the DHC network on the demand side, providing the necessary cooling and heating for the buildings.
GEOTABS is an acronym for a GEOthermal heat pump combined with a Thermally Activated Building System (TABS). GEOTABS systems combine the use of geothermal energy, which is an almost limitless and ubiquitous energy source, with radiant heating and cooling systems, that can provide very comfortable conditioning of the indoor space. GEOTABS hybrid refers to the integration of GEOTABS with secondary heating and cooling systems and other renewables, offering huge potential to meet heating and cooling needs in buildings in a sustainable way. By use of Model Predictive Control (MPC), a new control-integrated building design procedure and a readily applicable commercial system solution in GEOTABS hybrid, the overall efficiency of heating and cooling will be significantly improved in comparison to current best practice GEOTABS systems.
Public bodies face the lack of appropriate easy-to-use tools to support them in the definition, simulation and evaluation of suitable strategies for sustainable heating and cooling. These strategies should be tailored to local conditions for achieving the ambitious targets set-up in their local plans. PLANHEAT aims to fill this gap.
PLANHEAT’s main objective is to develop and validate in real case scenarios an integrated and easy-to-use tool which will support local authorities in selecting, simulating and comparing alternative low carbon and economically sustainable scenarios for heating and cooling.
The project tackles energy efficiency at district level by developing an innovative district heating & cooling (DHC) network controller. The project partners have developed a controller based on self-learning algorithms, which is currently experimented in the two STORM demo sites. The developed controller will enable to maximize the use of waste heat and renewable energy sources in DHC networks. To experiment the STORM platform’s general applicability, the controller will be demonstrated in these two demo sites: one highly innovative low-temperature DHC network in the Netherlands and a more common medium-temperature district heating grid in Sweden. In Rottne, Sweden, the STORM controller will help to reduce the oil usage and optimise the bio-fuel boilers. For Heerlen, the Netherlands, the STORM controller is vital to manage the capacity of the flooded mine galleries and to balance the different clusters.
There is enough waste energy produced in the EU to heat the EU’s entire building stock; despite of this huge potential, only few small-scale examples of urban waste heat recovery are present across the EU. The objective of ReUseHeat is to demonstrate first of their kind advanced, modular and replicable systems enabling the recovery and reuse of excess heat available at the urban level.
ReUseHeat will tackle both technical and non-technical barriers to unlocking urban waste heat recovery projects and investments across Europe. There are four large-scale demonstrators in the project, showing the technical feasibility and economic viability of excess heat recovery and reuse from data centres (Brunswick), sewage collectors (Nice), cooling system of a hospital (Madrid) and underground station (Bucharest).