The RELaTED project was presented at at Sustainable Places 2020, held as digital event due to the health situation in Europe. Antonio Garrido Marijuan explained the main developments of RELaTED within the Integration of Renewables in DHC for Sustainable Living workshop, held on 28th October 2020.
The workshop intended to exchange new ideas, lessons learnt from implementation and proposals about the integration of substantial shares of renewable energy sources in district heating and/or cooling (DHC) systems, in order to share commonly with external colleagues the main concepts on reducing the dependency of DHC on fossil fuels and ultimately leading to a more efficient and sustainable energy system.
The presentation of the RELaTED project shared the session with other very interesting European project such as WEDISTRICT (presented by Maria Victoria Cambronero Vazquez, from Acciona), or REWARDHeat (presented by Jack Corscadden, from Euroheat & Power).
The session, chaired by Carolina Ferrandis, was attended by more than 30 persons, being both the scientific community and the industry well represented each with 42% of the audience.
The main lessons learnt from the RELaTED Project
After the presentations of the different projects an interesting debate was held, where the main lessons learnt from the RELaTED Project were shared as following:
- Digitalization in Tartu shows that this process is key for a proper transition to ULT networks, as it can detect suboptimal conditions and where further reduction of temperature is possible.
- Beoelek, the operator of the DH in Belgrade shows that an operator with political interes can succeed on the descarbonization of the network even with a conventional business view.
- The non-technical issues are crucial on the proper development and adaptation of the DH network to Ultra Low Temperatures, as it was learnt from the VINGE demo case, where important delays were experienced due to the real-estate sector, the macroeconomic situation as well as other aspects strictly not related to technical constrains.
Regarding the audience, different pools were answered by them. The attendees considered that local authorities are the main actores on the decarbonization of the DH networks, while the financial is the main obstacle.
