How to heat your house using seawater

I’ve just got back from the Hague - home of the seawater district heating project. I spent three sunny days there talking to people involved in this project - engineers, managers, civil servants, and even had a very exciting technical visit and saw for myself how the seawater heating plant works.


The sea water heating plant is part of the city’s plan to use more sustainable energy and is one of the steps being taken towards making the Hague ‘climate by 2050. Today seawater heating system provides 750 houses in the area of Duindorp with heating and hot water; and it is planned to connect further 300 houses to this system. As Mr Henk Heijkers from the City of the Hague Sustainability Department put it, “my dream is that the whole Scheveningen Harbour area gets fantastic new buildings with the new Duindorp all connected on seawater energy”. Duindorp is a new housing estate area along the North Sea Coast built to replace 1100 old energy inefficient houses that used to be small former fishermen family houses built between 1915 and 1931.


The concept of seawater heating system is innovative but simple: it consists of a seawater central supply unit with a heat exchanger and heat pump unit that uses the nearby sea as a temperature source. The technologies involved are not new, but it is the way they were combines that attracts attention: it is an innovation that allows constructing a very efficient system for making seawater or surface water the source of energy for heating homes as well as heating water – and not only during a warmer season.


The idea of a sustainable heating system was proposed by the housing corporation Vestia – it is now an owner of the seawater heating system. However, it took some time to find the most suitable system: for a few months government authorities, housing corporation, engineering consultancy and utility companies were involved in a process of brainstorming and discussion. Eventually, Mr Paul Stoelinga from Deerns came up with the idea of combining a heat exchanger, a central heat pump and small water pumps in the homes. In summer, the heat exchanger feeds heated water to local grid, drawing enough heat from the seawater to cover residents' need. In winter, the job is taken over by the central screw ammonia heat plant. This allows ensuring that throughout the year residents of the Duindorp houses get indoor comfort and tap water at the right temperature.
While in the Hague, I had a tour around the central unit located near the harbour. This small warehouse-looking building contains both the central heat exchanger and heat pump. Smaller individual heat pumps are installed in each home for further heating.



The overall efficiency of the heat generation process with this system is more than 50% better than with conventional high-efficiency boilers, while the cost to the residents is no higher. Moreover, it results in a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions.
Similar system can be installed pretty much anywhere in the world close to the body of water and it would even be cheaper in case of fresh water, because there’s no need to protect the heat pump, heat exchanger and water pumps against salt corrosion. So why not use it in the UK?

The Great Divide between academics and practitioners

On 3 and 4 October I attended the UK Energy Research Centre’s workshop on Local Energy Governance, at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford. Day one focused on research approaches, overlaps and synergies (Catalina will blog about this shortly), while day two revolved around the relationship between academia en practitioners / community groups. It is probably appropriate to note here that the term practitioner was contested by the practitioners present at the workshop, and perhaps rightly so, judging by the diversity of backgrounds. Some ‘practitioners’ also publish research (e.g. Consumer Focus, Forum for the Future) - perhaps non-academics would have been a more appropriate term?

During the day a number of themes were brought to the fore, including the perception that academic research usually only finds what practitioners already know, and that academic research is too slow, partly due to funding becoming available too late. Furthermore, funding was perceived to be too project-focused and is often not available to the many spin-offs generated by many successful projects. Another issue was that academic reports often aren’t digestible for practitioners, and that reports and case studies are available in such quantities and variety of places, that for practitioners such as community groups they often are of little value.

Another big issue that was discussed was the uneven relationship between academics and practitioners: practitioners often don’t get enough out of participating in research projects (something to keep in mind in our own case study work!). This, however, could be addressed by cooperation in the research design phase. If this isn’t possible, then perhaps academics should give something back to the practitioners, like sharing certain academic skills, for example by giving a workshop on how to do a good questionnaire/survey. Practitioners should not have too low expectations when contacted by academics for the dreaded ‘hour of your time’ – why not ask for something tangible in return rather than simply deciding on a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ when asked to participate?

Overall, there was a sense of lack of involvement of practitioners / community groups and a disconnect between what they need to know and what academia is researching. In other words, there needs to be more of a dialogue between both groups. Suggestions to achieve this link-up even included ‘adopt a local authority’, and speed dating to link up the right research needs with the right academics. On this point, a very interesting attempt to bridge this gap has already been made by the Grassroots Innovations blog, where practitioners are called on to get in touch with their research suggestions and ideas. Let’s hope this will prove useful in building on the issues discussed!

Cities of the Future?

Highlights from the CITIES Performance Conference, London, 6-7 October

On the 6^th of October I went to the CITIES Performance Conference organised by Buro Happold, EDGE Debate and the Italian, Dutch and Danish Embassies in London. The day was dedicated to some interesting and (sometimes) controversial presentations on cities and their future. Whether you agree or not with some of the stuff shown there is not for me to decide. However, the day made me thing that that architectural practice has come a long way in the 10 years I left the profession! 

2011 Residential complex ALER (Milan) by Mario Cucinella Architects

This project aims to renovate and extend a social housing estate in Milan. It plans to upgrade the energy efficiency of the existing towers, provide new uses and district heating in the basement and built new student accommodation on the roofs. We have had ‘walkways in the sky’, we’ll have now ‘villages in the sky’! No flooding worries and, I am sure, those pioneers/ students will find innovative low carbon ways of transport ‘from’ and ‘to’ their flats.

Photos - Copyright Mario Cucinella Architects

2008 The Rotating Tower (Dubai of course!) by David Ficher

This is world’s first ‘building in motion’, exclusively powered by renewable energy (solar and wind)!!! It has a highly engineered and computerised internal structure which allows each floor to move independently. The Dubai’s tower will reach 80 floors: the top 10 floors will be used for luxury ‘villa’ style apartments, below which a further 35 floors of accommodation, then the 15 floors below will comprise an extravagant hotel and the lowest 20 floors used as retail space – there is also a ‘Ferrari lift’ which allow each occupant to take his/her Ferrari to his door on the 70+ floor! The Rotating Tower design uses photovoltaic cells and wind turbine technology to collect enough energy to power itself. The cells which will be placed on the top surface of each floor will be 15% open to the sun’s rays on all 80 floors for the full day helping to power the building. Hmmm! 

Photos - Copyright Dynamic Architecture/ David Fisher

For a provocative (if not scary) movie go to http://www.dynamicarchitecture.net/

Catalina Turcu, UCL

07 October 2011

Energy and People Conference in Oxford

The Environmental Change Unit at Oxford and UKERC Meeting Place organised an excellent conference 20-21 September. It kicked of with an illuminating and very funny opening lecture by Elizabeth Shove on different ways of conceptualising energy and people: attitudes/behaviour/choice (ABC) or systems of provision and infrastructure or social practices - no prizes for guessing she favoured the latter although her main message was to be aware of your theoretisation and argue for it. Amongst the multiple workshops, I chose the communities and energy one for the first day. We heard about a new complexity based project from Leeds, the work of the HCA and (an impromptu but excellent mini-talk) the PACE scheme from USA which is the model for the UK Green Deal (but coming out of the private not the public sector). There was a reality check about energy crises in Ghana and environmental justice and energy in the UK, details of the UNLOC project from Surry and some interesting ideas on reflexive governance from Denmark. But the community theme did not seem to be where the core interests of this conference lay. Despite Elizabeth Shove's opening cautionary words about the ABC approach, the behavioural theme raised the most interest in the workshops I attended. The one on energy behaviour in non-domestic buildings and in urban development was very lively with talks on the role of investors, tenants, lawyers and letting agents in shaping this behaviour (ECI), identification of different pathways in zero-carbon housebuilding (Manchester) and the impact of Green Building Councils worldwide (Maastricht). The Green Gauge Trust provided warnings about the lack of capacity in the refurb market and ECI identified that this market was worth £28 b.p.a. of which about 45% could be oriented towards low carbon retrofit, an interesting figure to ponder.