Background

The transition towards sustainable, energy efficient houses has gained traction. Many new energy concepts developed in this context assume an all-electric solution with solar panels, infrared heating and heat pumps. Experience has learned that these concepts are developed for low rise buildings and are difficult to adept for high-rise. High-rise building, such as appartment blocks, are frequently occurring in densly built urban areas. The need for an alternative solution for a natural gas free heat supply is required. Existing heating grids in The Netherlands are almost all based on high temperatures, fed by sources (garbage incinerators, fossil power plants) that will mostly disappear in the near future. In a society with fossil fuels, high temperature sources are rare. Therefore it is important to match supply and demand at exergy level (quality of energy). Buildings require low-exergy energy, which can be obtained from low temperature waste heat. By exchanging heat and cold, 50% of energy in a common city can be saved.

Project goals

The energetic solutions for a sustainable built environment are mainly found in flexible and extendable/modular (open) cold heating grids with temperatures between 15 - 30 °C. These grids are fed with industrial waste heat (sewage, data centers, super markets, swimming pools), solar heat (solar collectors, PVT) and geothermal power. Above all, these grids can provide heating and cooling power at the same time. Such infrastructure has advantages over conventional high and low temperature heating grids, as well as the collective ground-based heat-cold storage. However, cold heating grids are not ready for market launch yet.

Within this project, we will research and demonstrate the feasibility of thes flexible, modular open cold heating grids. This involves the technology, business case, operational procedures and acceptance by stakeholders. By including this wide range of aspects, the results of the projects will be ready for market introduction. The end result will be the beginning of the first open cold heating grid in the Netherlands.

Expected results

The project runs from the beginning of 2018 until the summer of 2020. The project will result in the following tools:

A technological design ("template") with which open cold heating grids can be designed.
a decision support tool to calculate the business cases for different stakeholders.
A operations model for cold heating grids.
A model to help finding the optimal process to reach a supported cold heating grid (stakeholder & user acceptance).
An online wakowiki for (end)users with excellent information about technical, economical, legal, operations and sustainability aspects of cold heating grids.

The project will involve the developments and results of a number of European research projects, bringing their knowledge into the market.