Heating the Future: The Untapped Potential of Waste Heat Recovery in European Cities

Waste heat recovery represents a largely untapped renewable energy resource, capable of meeting a significant portion of the European Union's energy needs for building heating and hot water production.

This potential has remained mostly unutilized, offering a broad opportunity for advancing towards more sustainable energy management.

The new EHPA report explains how to maximize waste heat recovery.

Waste Heat Recovery: A Solution Increasingly Adopted in European Urban Areas

Various sectors, from factories to data centers, have started implementing waste heat recovery systems that capture thermal energy from multiple sources. These systems effectively contribute to District Heating and Cooling (DHC), often integrated with heat pumps.

The online seminar organized by EHPA titled “From Waste to Worth: Innovative Waste Heat Recovery Solutions in District Heating & Cooling” provided an in-depth overview of how to implement these strategies, their operational benefits, and positive environmental impacts, presenting success stories from different European countries.

Organized under the EU's REWARDHeat project, funded by the Horizon 2020 program, the event highlighted experiences from France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland.

During the roundtable, András Takács, Policy Officer at Euroheat & Power, emphasized how district heating is becoming an increasingly adopted solution in European urban areas, with over 17,000 networks serving about 67 million citizens. Takács explained that in every city, there are untapped sources of residual heat, such as offices, commercial buildings, subway stations, data centers, and industrial plants.

These district heating and cooling systems use residual heat to produce hot water, which is distributed to buildings via a network of insulated underground pipes. By combining these infrastructures with heat pumps, it is possible to provide clean and efficient heating and cooling to millions of households, representing a sustainable alternative to traditional fossil fuel-based methods.

Waste Heat Recovery: The 4 Demonstration Sites

The seminar also introduced four demonstration sites that illustrate the effectiveness of waste heat recovery. The first, in La Seyne-Sur-Mer, France, involves a collaboration with Électricité de France (EDF), which has developed the DEMix platform for managing local energy networks. Côme Bissuel, a research engineer at EDF, explained how this platform facilitates the collection and sharing of data and forecasts, supporting the optimization of the network serving various buildings, including a pumping station, a casino, and a social housing complex.

Another example is the Clyde Gateway Energy Project in Glasgow, described by Hugh Moore as Scotland's most ambitious regeneration program. This project includes two district heating networks: an operational traditional one and a fifth-generation one in the planning stage, intended to expand to serve an increasing number of buildings.

In Luleå, Sweden, Jon Summers of RISE described how waste heat from a data center is used to power the local district heating network, even operating in external temperatures of -20°C.

Finally, Jere Oksananen illustrated the case of Helsinki, where the energy company HELEN has implemented an extensive district heating network and a heat pump plant with a capacity of 160 MW for heating and 100 MW for cooling, showcasing the advanced level of integration achieved in Finland.