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.

From the Planning Research Conference

Energy was not a big theme at the Planning Research Conference recently held at University of Birmingham, but there were a couple of papers of interest. The EPSRC CALEBRE project was highlighted. This looks at retroffiting 'hard to treat' housing stock and one conclusion was strongly emphasised: the lack of skills in the UK SME sector. Loss of insulation at service entry points was often exacerbated by retrofitting and poor installation of energy saving equipment sometimes led to higher energy consumption. Their research showed that consumers are worried about poor workmanship and on this basis they are right! One way forward is for local authorities or NGOs to work on a neighbourhood or street basis and monitor work standards as part of their procurement role.
Another interesting paper came from Germany and looked at cooperatives. Apparently two new energy cooperatives were opening every month in Germany last year. These organisations have climate protection written into their founding charters and can be used for a variety of urban development projects. One advantage is that such cooperatives can access finance, both public and private. An example can be found at www.moeckernkiez.de.

Devolution to cities. Could this be the answer to urban energy decentralisation?

Today, it has been announced that England's biggest cities will be able to bid for powers from central government to boost economic growth, after a series of amendmends to the Localism Bill received cross-party support in the House of Lords. This would pave the way for cities to have greater control over policy areas such as economic growth, housing and planning and regeneration. Cities would also be free to pool resources across functioning economic areas. It seems that cities will be able to bid for freedom to set their own distinctive policies and when they will come up with innovative proposals for doing things differently, the central government will devolve the powers cities need to implement them. Could this be the answer to a more successful and extensive decentralisation of urban energy systems? And how about smaller-scale cities and towns?

Catalina Turcu, UCL
14 September 2011

ARUP Scenarios: Renewables 'could provide 35% of energy capacity by 2020'

A new report by Arup for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) suggests there is huge potential to expand the use of renewable energy technology across the country.

The research looks at three scenarios for the future operation of renewables – low, medium and high – based on the maximum capacity that could be built per year between now and 2030.

The study looks at a range of technologies including wind, solar, hydro, biomass, geothermal and energy from waste, but does not highlight the benefits of one particular renewable technology.

Arup said that it will be up to government, industry and the public to decide how to overcome the barriers to greater use including planning issues and the costs of connection to the grid.

The study provides a detailed picture of generation costs and deployment potential for a wide range of technologies.

Catalina Turcu, UCL
17 June 2011

2011 NESS Part 1 – The 10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference, Stockholm

Climate change and the story of two planets

Two planets meet in outer space. One is a beautiful blue marble planet, while the other is a very sad planet, in a poor shape.  The beautiful blue planet asks the other:

-          What ‘on Earth’ has happened to you?

The other says wearily:

-          I’ve got Homo Sapiens!

The beautiful blue marble planet answers back:

-          Don’t worry it will pass quickly!

by Johan Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Stockholm Environment Institute

Catalina Turcu, UCL

17 June 2011

Carbon Capture and Storage event at UCL

You might be interested in the following:

IEEP in collaboration with the Energy Research Centre in the
Netherlands, Cambridge University, the Tyndall Centre, the Fraunhofer
Institute, and CIEMAT are organizing a workshop investigating the public
perception of carbon capture and storage. The conference will be held at the University College of London on June 23rd . For more information, please see:
www.communicationnearco2.eu
or contact Richard Foulsham on:
t. +44 (0)207 679 1511
e. r.foulsham@ucl.ac.uk

Yvonne Rydin

Bavarian Renewables!

Just back from one week holiday to Bavaria, in Germany! I was really impressed by the amount of solar panels (both PV and thermal) pepper-potted in the Bavarian landscape - they were everywhere and sometimes covering HUGE areas!!! - on houses, sheds or temporary roofs, everywhere! Almost every house in certain towns had solar panels on them - and in considerable quantities - and they all FED IN! We also came across two or three really big solar farms (near Wurzburg and Nurnberg from what I remember), big plastic containers for biofuels (usually adjacent to bigger farms) and many wind turbines. However, I couldn't notice the same 'activity' in bigger towns or cities. It seemed to me that the 'renewables deployment' was considerably more advanced in rural and semi-urban areas than in urban areas. Why?

The farmer we stayed with explained that the government has very strong financial incentives in place for solar energy generation: the unit of generated solar electricity was almost double the price of traditional energy. In addition, farmers were offered a 20-year deal during which the 'double' price was fixed and on average the first 10 years paid for the investment while the next 10 made a healthy profit for the farmer. He thought (and this is interesting for the CLUES project) that it is more difficult to make it profitable or apply the same scale of deployment to urban areas where roofs were smaller and more compact, or it might prove difficult to agree a deal in multi-occupancy buildings (where more than one household lived under the same roof) where homeowners had to agree a common ground. He also told us that the wind turbines were mainly the enterprise of energy companies and were somehow unpopular with the general public because of altering the landscape (heard it before!) and that many farms were generating biofuel!

Catalina Turcu, UCL
6 June 2011