Why district cooling?
Comfort indoors – what is it? Quite simply, the indoor environment mustn’t be too hot or too cold. It has to be just right.
District heating already provides 50% of all Swedes with warm radiators and hot water in their taps. But in our well insulated homes, and at our workplaces and offices with their computers and other electronic equipment generating heat, sometimes a little cool air is needed to ensure the complete wellbeing of both staff and equipment. And that’s why we have district cooling.
District cooling is based on the same clever concept as district heating – the fact that it’s better to allow a central, environmentally friendly plant to do the job instead of having lots of little cooling plants and air conditioning units which may make a noise, drip, eat electricity, take up valuable space and require maintenance.
Comfort = quality of life
In 1990, just one in every ten cars sold in Sweden had air conditioning. Ten years later, almost all new cars came with air conditioning. In other words, our demands for comfort are increasing at an enormous pace, and of course the in-car environment isn’t our only concern
At hospitals, maintaining a pleasant indoor temperature can be absolutely crucial to patients’ wellbeing. Modern offices contain lots of heat-generating computers, photocopiers and other technical equipment. Hardware in computer rooms and server halls has to be cooled constantly in order to function at all. And the same is true for many manufacturing processes in industry
We humans simply don’t function well when we’re too hot. The open plan offices and modular solutions of today also complicate the climate environment to a huge extent, with enormous variations from workstation to workstation.
Good choice for the environment
District cooling involves cooling the property using cold water which is distributed in pipes from a central cooling plant – a cooling plant which is often run by the same company as the one producing district heating in the locality. District cooling is used currently at large properties such as schools, hospitals and apartment blocks. Like district heating, district cooling often utilises waste heat from processes such as waste incineration or combined power and heating generation which would otherwise be lost
Heating pumps are sometimes used to generate both heating and cooling in one and the same system. In other cases, cooling water is taken from nearby lakes and waterways.
There are many ways to produce district cooling, but they all have one thing in common – the fact that their environmental impact and energy consumption are minimal compared with the effect if the properties linked to the system had been cooling using local cooling plants. District cooling plants are operated more efficiently and professionally now, often using biofuels and other fuels which don’t contribute to the greenhouse effect. For society in general, district cooling offers major environmental benefits and allows us to economise on natural resources.
Massive expansion
In the 1980s, many district heating companies invested in huge heating pumps and realised that even the cold side of these pumps could be used to improve energy consumption. Sweden’s first district cooling plant was commissioned in 1992, and nowadays it provides some 30 or so plants all over Sweden with district cooling equivalent to almost 700 GWh. Surveys have shown that the total demand for district cooling in Sweden amounts to 2000-5000 GWh, which would mean turnovers for district cooling in the region of between SEK 1 and 2.5 billion.