The Danish Industry is running a web system pointing at energy solutions, companies involved, projects, including solar thermal. You can find the map at http://www.energymap.dk. You find the Marstal Central Solar Heating Plant, their contact company and other information on the direct link http://www.energymap.dk/Profiles/Ramboll/Cases/Large-Scale-solar-heating-in-Marstal.

Any Danish owner of a plant or a company is invited to contribute to the common resource. Please do so.

After a mail correspondence, John Perlin, did a great job on presenting the solar plant at Marstal. You may find the blog entry at http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/solar-water-heater-plant-denmark-1437 – Thank you John.

Gram Central Solar Heating

A new plant at Gram, Denmark, is to take the lead as the largest of it’s type. Based on all the experiences from the many installations, the first step of the Gram-plant is errected in marts-april 2009 (see picture – more pictures are presented in a Gallery).

The plant is described as follows:

Gram District Heating is expected to supply 17 procent the towns demand in district heating, which is approx. the total demand of 190 single family houses.

In a first fase, 802 solfangere from Arcon Solvarme are mounted in spring 2009. They produce approx. 7 MW yearly results in 4800 MWh and solar fraction of 117%. This leads to a CO2 emission reduction by 1,110 ton.

The expected life time for the installation is estimated to 25, whereas the oldest plant is still running at Saltum since 21 yeras.

The investement of 18 mio. Danish Kroner is expected to bring a pay back time of 7-9 years.

I found the following conference paper abstract that seems to point out that European activities on Central Solar Heating seems to wake up. http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/cpl/record/index.xsql?pubid=64021

It will be interesting to follow this European Platform:

http://esttp.org/cms/front_content.php

I will try to follow up on it.

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

The Danish Engineering Newspaper did present the following news about a new very large CSHP plant:

Place: Denmark, Brænderup (near Horsens), at the mainland.

Size: 8.000 m² solar collector field, sized to deliver 10% of the district heating demand.

Of the 13 million total cost, the 3.5 millioner DDK are funded by a public body, Energinet.dk, that last year did analyse solar and district heating lead to positiv economical results. This analysis pointed out that this is due to the fact that the heat- or power plant can be turned of for some periods, where the price for power is too low to produce.
The maximum effect is estimated to 6 MW heat, with an annual production of approx. 4,000 MWh heat, leading to a yearly emission reduction of 4,300 tons CO2. The plant is designed by consultant company Planenergi and Ramboll, Denmark with Arcon solar collector producer, the same companies as involved in most of the plants in Denmark.

One ought not to forget the main distribution and consumption system for CSHP, the District Heating. Such systems can be used for both heating and cooling. This is certainly obtained by Euroheat, an organisation for the European district heating and cooling industry. They published a nice brochure on district heating and cooling, mentioning a few of the solar plants.

The solar cooling part is of high relevance, due to the fact that cooling demands are closely related to the occurence of the sun. Hence demands and solar availability match perfectly.