Yle News. Text by Heini Holopainen.
Heat storage is nothing new as such, but now the technology is making its way to the market.
This is what it's all about
The pilot field has been cleared in the backyard of the beverage manufacturer Finn Spring, in a grain field in Toholamm, Central Ostrobothnia.
In the summer, energy captured by solar collectors and waste heat from industrial compressors will be fed into underground heat wells. During the cold season, the heat is used to heat the floors of a nearby building.
That’s the Centria University of Applied Sciences energy project in a nutshell. It’s a living lab-type project, which both tests and exploits the results of the tests.
Heat goes underground
The field has 61 heat wells drilled to a depth of around 50 metres. Once the piping and other technology is in place, heat storage in the wells will begin, effectively next summer.
The industrial waste heat comes from nearby compressors in the beverage plant. Solar collectors will be installed on the roof of the company’s office and swimming pool building.
It is calculated that the water in the warehouse will gradually heat up to its target temperature. In about six months, the temperature should be between 60 and 70 degrees below ground.
In winter, the water-circulating underfloor heating system in the office and swimming pool building of the drinks manufacturer runs on the stored heat.
Industrial compressors produce waste heat all the time. However, it cannot be directed to the ground storage except in summer, when the waste heat is not needed to heat the storage.
From experiment to practice
Technical expert Pekka Erkkilä from Centria University of Applied Sciences is satisfied. The EU-funded project is half-way through, and we will soon get down to practical implementation.
– We are trying to show that ground heat storage works and is profitable. There are a few heat storage methods in the world, some of them quite old, but here we have made use of new ideas and new technology to a large extent. This will be an optimized heat storage system.
Centria University of Applied Sciences is still looking for another pilot site. It would use only solar heat.
Centria’s pilot site in Toholamm was chosen because they wanted to try something new at Finn Spring,” says Hannu Ali-Haapala, CEO.
– For our company, the goal has always been to save energy and also to look for different ways to produce and save energy. We don’t yet know what heat storage will produce, but it should bring these savings.
A huge market is waiting
The aim of the project is that the technology developed can be sold to a paying customer in the future. To this end, the project involves a start-up company from Kokkola, Heliostorage.
Solar heat has been stored in the world and in Finland for twenty years. For example, a solar village was created in Kerava, where heat was stored in a huge mass of water.
Aalto University has studied storage and it has also been tested in the Nordic countries. In Canada, an entire village has been heated by stored solar energy for a decade.
– Ten years ago, solar thermal components were expensive. The price of a solar cell was a thousand euros per square metre, whereas today it is a tenth of that. Drilling technology, and especially IT and control technology, have advanced and similarly become a fraction cheaper. Costs have come down so much that it’s worth trying to commercialise this,” says Timo Sivula, development director.
A small start-up has big ambitions. In the future, the heat storage system will be sold domestically, but especially abroad, from northern Estonia to the south and east. According to Sivula, the global market for cooling and heating systems is worth billions of euros.
– The market is worth 18 billion. Of that, a billion a year is now going into low or zero emission technology. That is the market we are aiming for. The majority of customers will certainly be outside Finland. Finland is so far north that solar collectors would have to be huge if we were to rely on them alone.
In Helsinki, on the other hand, there are plans for the storage and utilisation of warm seawater.
