ABB to help decarbonise district heat supply near UNESCO World Heritage area in Denmark
08 November 2021
ABB will supply integrated electrical infrastructure for seawater heat pump to deliver green heat to over 100,000 inhabitants of Danish port city of Esbjerg.
Urban areas account for over 70 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, with heating and cooling representing the largest share of energy consumption, so delivering sustainable and affordable heating and cooling to cities is a priority in the fight against climate change.
ABB will deploy its complete electrical, instrumentation and control (EIC) package, motors and variable speed drives for the powerhouse of the heat pump, which will be the world’s largest seawater heat pump based on CO2 as a refrigerant. With Esbjerg facing the UNESCO world heritage area of the Wadden Sea, the careful selection of the right pump was essential. The 50MW seawater heat pump system from MAN Energy Solutions, a long-standing customer of ABB, converts electrical energy into thermal energy and uses toxicologically safe CO2 as a refrigerant for the entire system cycle.
“With the cornerstone laid for a flexible and sustainable district heating, our vision is to continue to create quality green alternatives in renewable electricity production,” said Christian Udby Olsen, CEO at DIN Forsyning.
As part of its 2030 strategy to pursue a 100 percent fossil free heat production with zero loss of applied resources, DIN Forsyning is developing a new hybrid renewable district heat plant to replace heat currently supplied by Esbjerg coal-fired combined heat and power (CHP) plant. For the CHP plant – which produces about half of all district heating for Esbjerg – to be decommissioned in April 2023, DIN Forsyning had to be ready with alternative heat sources for the district heating, which can reduce primary energy consumption by 50 percent and generate low-carbon energy from heat pumps.
ABB’s technology will contribute to the replacement of the coal-fired plant as the main source of heat for the city of Esbjerg and get closer to the goal of reducing carbon emissions in the city. It will also be deployed to ensure that the entire heating network can be powered from renewables, and distributed to the plant, through connections to the offshore wind turbines in the North Sea. In addition, ABB will supply a medium voltage variable speed drive, motors, as well as electrical and control solutions to support the high efficiency of the system and the accurate control of this massive heat pump.
Christian Udby Olesen added, “District heating is an important part of Esbjerg city’s ambition to become a CO2 neutral municipality by 2030. The technology of partners as ABB is instrumental in our ability to revolutionise the future of district heating, which will be based on new green solutions. We believe that this approach will resonate both in Denmark and the rest of the world.”
“At ABB, we embed sustainability in everything we do to enable energy efficient, low carbon operations and support the development of new and renewable energy models, so this project to transform the global district heating system and provide a greener solution for the residents of Esbjerg is a particularly exciting one for us,” adds Per Erik Holsten, Head of Energy Industries for Northern Europe at ABB.
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