On 24th of March, CLIC Innovation organised a seminar about district heating, consisting of Finnish HOPE project stakeholders. The event was arranged for the visit of Donna Gartland, CEO of Irish district heating company CODEMA.
Gartland introduced the current energy systems in Ireland and the ambition of their working group to build a smart district heating energy system from scratch in Dublin. Dublin is a city still dominated by individual gas boilers and strongly dependent on gas import. She pointed out the importance of collaboration with Finland, Sweden, and Denmark – countries with proven experience and highly developed DH networks.
In this sense, Jukka Makkonen from Helen introduced Helsinki DHC networks in a nutshell, and reviewed Helen’s ambitious goal to become carbon neutral by 2030. Fuel sources and generators are diverse, and heat pumps are strategically deployed to use a variety of waste heat, sea water and thermal storage. This is supplemented with RES integration and tailored customer solutions. As a result, system resilience should be guaranteed proactively by cyber-security measures of the energy network. This was also emphasized by Mats Fagerström as the chief security officer at Helen and reimbursed by Peter Sund from the Finnish Information Security Cluster (FISC).
Finally, Sari Hirvonen-Kantola and Hanna Kosunen (University of Oulu) highlighted the importance of integrated urban and energy planning for an energy efficient pathway of city transformation. Spatial, techno-economic, environmental, and social features should be holistically integrated and analyzed, in order to support decision making and efficient urban policies. There is great cooperation potential for Ireland and Finland, especially with the new insight we will gain from the HOPE project.
Read more about CODEMA here!