Running hot and cold

How can district heating supply an ice rink, who pays an disproportionate amount for warmth in the UK, and where gets more rain: Glasgow or Singapore? 

Scottish Renewables Policy Manager Stephanie Clark blogs from this week’s Low Carbon Heat and Water Conference.

Scotland's policy lead on renewable heat helped Scottish Enterprise bring an international conference on the subject to Glasgow this week, as well as being the cause of good-natured jealousy from English visitors.

The International Conference on Low Carbon Heat and Water heard from the ADE's Tim Rotheray that

"while heat is front and centre in Scotland", a "much larger focus on cost in the rest of the UK"

meant the uptake of heat technology had not progressed as fast elsewhere. Costs which, as Tim pointed out, are being unfairly distributed among the population, with 11% of UK households relying on electricity to provide warmth.

In the same session, and part of a theme around heating and cooling working together which ran (intentionally or not) through the conference, Aberdeen Heat and Power boss Ian Booth told how the city's system supplies both a swimming pool and an ice rink, as well as lowering household fuel bills by 20-50%.

In a similar vein, Star Renewable Energy's Dave Pearson used an energetic PowerPoint presentation to tell the story of his company's international successes in providing both heat and cooling.

Dave also outlined a future in which warm water at 15c is circulated through urban areas and used, through heat pumps, to warm homes and businesses, avoiding the high heat losses common with conventional district heating schemes.

Later in the day, in a session on water innovation, heat once again stood front and centre, with control system experts Regin AB showing how huge heat loads can be tamed by district heating, and how outdoor sports can come indoors through the winter.

The Swedish city of Sundsvall became the first in Europe to install a Surfstream indoor surfing machine in 2010, at a complex which also features a 50-metre outdoor pool, a lazy river, and what looked like dozens of saunas.

That complex, called Himlabadet (Swedish for 'heavenly bath'), highlights the vast energy use of swimming pools, at 403kWh per square metre per year.

Indeed, as Regin AB’s Goran said: "The energy costs [of a swimming pool] are so high that it's hard to get the economics to add up.”

Despite this, the local authority in Sundsvall succeeded in building Himlabadet. Four in every ten units of heat energy for the project are now provided free by the city's energy from waste-powered district heat scheme, because its ability to absorb excess warmth benefits the system – remarkable stuff.

A final fact from the water session (and one which might cheer up those of us who live in the west of Scotland): Singapore has twice as much rainfall as Glasgow.
Although, not to depart from the conference's theme, theirs is rather warmer than ours.