Seawater heat pump

Saline solution

Who

Glasgow-based Star Refrigeration has launched a renewable energy heating system, which will heat homes and businesses across an entire city in Norway.

Technology

The cooling technology firm has sold one of its Neatpumps to the city of Drammen. The heat pump extracts heat from seawater and the waste heat is captured, compressed, boosted and recycled to provide hot water at up to 90°C for heating buildings. The system will supply hot water pumped through a network of underground pipes for heating more than 6,000 homes and businesses in the city.

The Neatpump will provide up to 15MW of heat for Drammen when the project is completed next January. It will be the world’s largest district-wide natural heat pump system and marks the largest export order in Star’s 40-year history.

Heat pumps are becoming increasingly popular across Europe as the heat they deliver far exceeds the energy they consume. District heat pumps already exist in Scandinavia and across eastern and central Europe, providing higher efficiencies than traditional localised boilers. However, many of these first-generation systems rely on hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, which are thousands of times more potent as global warming gases than carbon dioxide when emitted into the atmosphere.

Unlike its forerunners, Star’s system does not require synthetic global warming gases. It operates using ammonia, a naturally occurring refrigerant that has zero ozone depletion potential. The company says that ammonia has never been used in a high-temperature heat pump application of this type. Electricity for the Drammen system is provided by hydropower.

Application

Dave Pearson, Star Refrigeration’s director of innovation, says that the Neatpump could also be used to heat factories, hospitals, office buildings and data centres. “A shocking amount of heat generated through cooling processes worldwide is simply discarded as waste into the atmosphere,” he says.

“Organisations could now be recycling waste heat from their process, air-conditioning and IT cooling systems and boosting it for use in their own and neighbouring buildings.”