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.

Through a research and development support of 11.9 mio. DDK, the Danish government pushes for CSHP with seasonal storage. In charge for the project is Planenergi, the most active consulting company in the business together with the plant owner, Dronningelund District Heating. The overall concept will be to use solar heating in combination with a large scale thermal storage and a heat pump. The collector area is planned to be approx. 35,000 square metres, a storage volume of 60,000 m³ and a heat pump with 3 MW effect.

The seasonal storage is planned as a pit water storage with floating lid, a well-known solution applied in the past.

The overall budget for the project is 80 mio. DDK or approx. 10.1 mio. Euros.

We keep an eye on this project at this blog.80

You are able to follow actual production data from large scale solar heating plants through at homepage. This gives you an idea of the performance for different plants at the same time, in real time . The texts are in Danish – however, the first value shows the actual production in kW, the second value shows the production per area and the third shows the actual solar irradiation.

You find the site at http://www.solvarmedata.dk/.

The CSHP in Brandstrup is one of the very large plants at this time. The solar heating plant is connected to a co-generation plant, whereas other plants are connected to district heating plants with no production of electricity. Therefore the results of this plant is rather interesting to see.

The plant is presented at http://www.braedstrup-fjernvarme.dk/side1298.html (in Danish). The plant was taken into operation in 2007. It consists of 8,000 m² of solar panels. Guests are invited to visit the plant where a rest area is prepared to them.

A new plant is placed north from Copenhagen in Hilleroed, more precise in Ulleroedbyen, a low energy building area. The plant is placed at the boundary of a motorway, not wasting too much agricultural land and acting as noise cover at the same time. The plant was raised in October 2007-2008.

The plant supplies a local district heating based on wood pallets for heating. The 240 panels of 12.58 m² are expected to produce a production of 37,500 MWh over the expected lifetime period of 25 years, saving the impact of 7,725 ton. CO

Solar heating at the motorway of Hillerød, Denmark

Behind the Danish homepage http://www.solvarmecenter.dk, the consultant company PlanEnergi does present a large number of solar heating systems, large as small. The site is very beautiful and ought to get attention by the readers of this blog. Thanks to Jan Erik Nielsen from PlanEnergi Sealand. PS: Why do you not show actively, who’s behind this nice site?

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

At the Eurosun 2008 in Lisbon, the thematic of large scale thermal storage was part of the topic range. Per Alex Sørensen from Planenergi, Denmark did provide me a copy of three papers that I refer here. Unfortunately, it seems that one cannot get the proceeding online. (This ought to be changed for any renewable energy and environmental conference, where proceedings ought to be open access and free for reading).

T. Schmidt and D. Mangold from the Steinbeis Research Institute, Stuttgart, Germany mailto:schmidt@solites.de did present a paper including three thermal storage projects, a 5,700 m3 water tank i Munich, a borehole storage 37,500 m3 volume in Crailsheim and a 4,500 m3 pit storage in Eggenstein.

F.Ochs, J. Nussbeicker-Lux at.al. presented the following abstract to their paper “Solar assisted district heating system with seasonal thermal energy storage in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen” with the following abstract:

The solar assisted district heating system with seasonal thermal energy storage in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen (Germany) is the first system realized with existing renovated buildings. The system consists of 1600 m² flat plate collectors and a 4500 m³ gravel-water thermal energy store (TES) for seasonal thermal storage. Experiences gained within the BMU-project “Further development of the pit heat store technology” contributed to the design of the seasonal TES. This paper focuses on the design and construction of the gravel-water store. The monitoring concept of the solar assisted district heating system with focus
on the gravel-water TES is presented.

Per Alex Sørensen, mailto:pas@planenergi.dk, from PlanEnergi, Leo Holm and Niels Aage Jensen from Marstal Fjernvarme, Denmark presented a paper “Water Storages, Solar thermal and Heat pumps in District Heatin” with the following abstract:

In 1996 Marstal Fjernvarme (Marstal District Heating) established 8.000 m2 solar collectors that covered 13% of the yearly consumption. The solar fraction in later built district heating plants goes up to 25% covering the total summer load, but several district heating companies especially natural gas fired combined heat and power plants want a higher solar fraction in order to replace expensive natural gas. Therefore new projects with solar fractions of 50% are designed and are expected to be implemented  in 2009. Design calculations show that the production price for heat from solar thermal plants with 50% solar fraction can compete with heat prices from natural gas fired CHP plants.