The 14th and 15th of January 2009, there was a workshop at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby with aims described by the workshop title “How ambitions can we be in contributing to the worlds energy needs with wind, solar and bio energy. – And what role does energy storage play?”

This was certainly a very interesting place to be and listen to experts, politicians and industries. At the workshop “solar energy” the experts in CSHP, Jan-Olof Dalenbäck, representing amongst other the European platform ESTTP (http://esttp.org), representatives from universities and two major players from industries Sten Beltman Jørgensen, Sunmark A/S (http://www.sunmark.com) and Jes Donneborg Arcon Solvarme A/S (http://www.arcon.dk). Backed up by others the target was to be defined for “solar thermal” including large solar.

Some remarks from the discussion show that even though CSHP have just a share of 1% of the collector area, the production share is at 9%, a Factor 9. This is due to size, efficiency and storage.

According to figures by Jan-Olof there are 30 central plants and 120 block and “small” plants at current times. As you will find in the coming future there are a number of plants under construction and planning.

It was discussed that subsidies schema do not support large-scale solar heating while supporting the small systems. It can be argued that subsidies are not necessary for CSHP due to the cost effectiveness for commercial plants. See the VEKS post below.

It was mentioned that there is a new project founded by the EU “SDH Take-off” probably Solar District Heating (SDH). You will find more on that topic later in this blog. (I could not find any through Cordis or Google – please help).

The method of the workshop was to define an ambitious target, uncover challenges which lead to a number of actions and from here a road map could be drawn. This work, over 2 days let to the following conclusion which was presented at the workshop: (my interpretation)

Pro-solar arguments are that you need 1 hour collection of all solar energy to supply the world with the total energy necessary. This ought to be possible. Solar produces 30-40 times the energy per area as biomass. The ambitious goal was defined at he the COP14 in Poznan, Poland to 50% of all heat demand must be supplied by solar heating in 2050. This target was than distributed over the period, not referred here.

The road map was laying out that all actions ought to start as fast as possible. Politicians ought to adopt the target (which they did i Poland). Next step ought to be public investments into maximum application of solar heating in public buildings, which would result in a) a stable marked condition for the industries and b) a critical mass for the production lines, assuming that marked conditions will lead to price-performance and competitiveness that brings along sustainability for the branch. A very important goal is than to increase the solar fraction of the technologies by improving/increasing the storage technologies. As another effort solar cooling would be investigated.

Please not that the workshop was also working with targets for other solar technology, education, wind and bio energy, plus energy storage.

I hope that other participants will be able to support by their descriptions and comments to this post or we will be able to supply with a proceedings or official summary by Risø. DTU, the organizers. Thanks to them. You may probably find it at http://risoe.dtu.dk

Next step will be COP15 – see http://www.cop15.dk/en

For the first time, a major district heating company is planing to adopt the concept of central solar heating. The company VEKS, distributing heat in the western part of the Copenhagen area is aiming at a CSHP with a solar collector size of 20,000 m2, placed along a main highway. The plant will match the current record of the Marstal plant, also placed in Denmark. The plant will deliver approx. the heat of 5-6,000 single family houses.CEO, Lars Gulev, of the “Vestegnens Kraftvarmeselskab” district heating company estimates the plant to produce 10 GWh heat to the district heating system. The goal is to get the plant into production before the International Climate Conference in Copenhagen, 2009, where the expectations are to replace the Kyoto-protocol with a more ambitious protocol.

It is expected that the application of central solar heating is a factor 4 more cost efficient compare to single family housing solar installations.

Relevant is to mention, that the company is expecting lower production prices for the solar plant compared to the traditional co-generation plants due to the facts that solar prices are reduced as conventional heating prices are increased during the later years.

“In the first place, the solar heating plant is planed due to commercial reasons. Getting reduced CO2 pollution is a environmental side effect.” says Lars Gulev.

We hope others will take this considerations up and CSHP will play a more dominant role in the future of district heating. It would be interesting to see, if surplus heat from the power production will be cooled into the see due to this investment.

You find information on VEKS’s homepage on http://www.veks.dk (in Danish), where you change to English and will be presented for general information on the district heating system of Copenhagen. The solar plant is presented at the location http://www.veks.dk/Artikler/Seneste%20nyt/Solvarme.aspx