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In 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark made news by opening up this:
a power plant that you can actually ski down,
even when there's no snow.
The Copenhill was designed
by Danish architects Bjarke Ingles Group,
and includes a hiking trail and climbing wall.
It even won World Building of the Year in 2021.
As absolutely cool as this building is,
the really interesting stuff is happening inside.
This is a waste-to-energy cogeneration facility.
Let's break down what this means.
Waste-to-energy means
that it literally takes municipal solid waste,
like trash from your bin,
and burns it to produce energy.
The impressive thing here
is that it burns the waste so cleanly
that it can have a smokestack right next to urban skiers.
It claims to be the cleanest incineration plant in the world
and produces more clean water than it uses.
And it's a cogeneration facility,
which means that it produces power and useful heat.
I say useful heat because most power plants produce heat.
In fact, most power plants burn something
to generate steam to move turbines,
which generate the power.
Even nuclear plants are essentially using uranium
to generate steam to push a turbine.
But lots of the heat energy
in a traditional power plant is lost.
Cogeneration plants are designed to capture that heat
and produce steam or hot water
that can heat nearby buildings.
The heat is piped to customers
and returned back to the plant to be heated again.
The Copenhill produces enough heat
to keep 150,000 homes warm and cozy.
This is called district heating
because the buildings, homes, offices, and factories
don't need to have their own separate furnaces
to generate heat.
The heat is provided at the scale of the entire district,
generated by a plant like this cool one here in Copenhagen.
The technology has been called one of the best,
most affordable ways to cut urban carbon emissions.
Yet right now, only 12% of buildings globally
are heated this way.
Is this right for your city?
Are there caveats?
Let's talk about them after the bike bell.
(bike bell dings)
Now, I'll be the first to admit that district heating
is not the most sexy topic in the world.
You deserve like a gold star or something
for even clicking on this video.
I mean, streets are cool to talk about,
power, water, sewer less so.
And district heating
is like infrastructure's long lost cousin.
You may not even be aware
that district heating exists in your community.
Many large European cities have some district heating,
and even some cities in the US.
District heating works best in cities
because the infrastructure required,
all of that pipe to transport steam or hot water,
gets expensive when you have to deploy it
to suburban or rural areas.
Just another reason why density and cities rock.
Countries like Norway with large hydroelectric dams
don't use district heating, however.
Electricity is a cheaper way of providing power for heat.
But we need to talk
about how buildings in cities are heated.
Half of the energy going into buildings
is used to heat hot water or the space itself.
CO2 emissions from heating buildings
reached an all time high in 2021,
which is obviously not great for the environment
to put it mildly.
Multiple environmental organizations
have identified district heating
as a way to reduce CO2 emissions
while still keeping homes and offices toasty warm.
The reason that district heating systems are so innovative
and great for the environment
is that they use waste heat generated by power plants.
It's that cogeneration stuff we were talking about
at the beginning of the video.
That waste heat heats up either water or steam,
which is transported via pipes throughout a district,
hence the name,
and the cool water or air is returned and rewarmed
to provide heat again.
As with all complicated systems, however,
the devil's in the details.
Some district heating systems
are more sustainable and efficient than others.
But technology is improving.
Let's look at that progression over time.
The first known district heating system
was in Roman times in Pompeii,
where warm geothermal water was circulated in trenches
through and under residential buildings and bathhouses
to provide heating.
One early example of district heating
was in the early 14th century
in Chaudes-Aigues, France,
where geothermal water was distributed to about 30 homes
and the town's church through wooden pipes.
In some parts of town, these pipes are still in use today.
The first modern generation began in the US in the 1880s,
and it was considered the state of the art until the 1930s.
It pushed steam through concrete pipes
and was generated by burning coal.
Most systems have moved away from this,
but New York City
continues to generate district heat this way.
The city has over 100 miles of pipe
providing steam to 1500 buildings,
including the Empire State Building,
Grand Central Station, and the UN Building.
The steam is generated through dedicated steam plants
and some cogeneration facilities,
like this Con Edison plant in Brooklyn.
Despite the location of the plant,
the extent of the district is only Manhattan
south of 96th Street.
Those orange and white smokestacks
you see in New York streets
are used to detect steam leaks
or other issues in the system.
The stacks keep the steam away from cars and pedestrians,
as steam's, well, it's hot.
The second generation reigned from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Heat was transmitted via hot water instead of steam,
and this generation produced the idea of cogeneration.
It was a popular system in Soviet Bloc countries
that valued affordable universal utilities.
Systems are still in the use of many places today.
District heating still heats a majority of homes
in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia,
and 53% of urban households in Ukraine.
Despite the age of these systems,
they can be retrofitted
to use fuels other than coal and oil,
giving these places a shortcut to urban sustainability.
The third generation started in the 1970s
and replaced the concrete pipes of the previous generations
with pre-insulated pipes
that let water be transmitted at lower temperatures,
increasing efficiency.
Water only needed to be at 90 degrees Celsius
instead of 120 degrees in the second generation,
or steam at 150 degrees and hotter in the first generation.
This generation was constructed
in response to the oil crisis,
so the heat was primarily generated
in cogeneration facilities with biomass and waste as fuel.
Scandinavian countries pioneered this generation.
The Danish cogeneration plant
shown in the beginning of this video
is an example of a fourth generation facility.
This generation isn't responding to the oil crisis,
but instead to climate change.
New systems improve efficiency
and recapture more waste heat.
They can transmit hot water at lower temperatures,
as low as 70 degrees Celsius.
And of course these new energy systems
are generating the heat
through biomass, waste energy, and geothermal
to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint.
Today, China has the most district heating systems
in one country,
but Copenhagen has the largest
individual district heating system in the world.
In response to the oil crisis in the 1970s,
the city changed its heating and energy policies
to ensure that local government
could continue to heat residence homes
while minimizing energy waste
and move away from excess energy imports.
Now the system heats over 98% of Copenhagen's buildings.
In addition to being the biggest individual system,
it's viewed as one of the best in the world at the moment.
It offers low emissions,
low cost heating to residents in the service area.
Fifth generation systems are still being developed,
but they're expected to use
primarily renewable energy sources
for both heating and cooling,
and the water they produce is at an even lower temperature.
There's recently been amazing progress
made on thermal storage,
basically creating batteries out of bricks and volcanic rock
that can discharge heat whenever it's needed.
Go check out a recent video on "Undecided with Matt Ferrell"
that dives into this fascinating topic.
Research is also ongoing
to make district cooling a viable option.
It's a fairly new invention
as it was first introduced in Hartford, Connecticut in 1962
to cool down some of its downtown buildings.
These systems can use different methods
for cooling down their water,
including refrigerants
or passing water pipes through a nearby cold water source
like a lake or the ocean.
One notable example of this
is Cornell University's Lake Source Cooling Project.
They use the cold waters of Cayuga Lake
to circulate past a heat exchanger
that cools the campus loop of pipes.
Those pipes cool buildings
then return to the lake to receive more coolth.
Did you know that the opposite of warmth is coolth?
Yeah, that's actually a word.
A smaller number of district heating systems
use residual heat to power steam chillers,
which in turn provides cool air to buildings.
New York City actually does this.
Typical AC units are very inefficient,
particularly when compared to district cooling.
Replacing old units can reduce energy use
and the urban heat island effect.
Here in the United States,
there are 2,500 district heating systems.
Now, cities do use them,
but the most common application these days is institutions,
places like college campuses.
The Cornell case study from a minute ago
is a great example of this.
Cal Poly, where I work, has a cogeneration plant on campus
that burns natural gas.
The university is actually planning on doing
the opposite of what Denmark is doing.
Instead of building a new cogeneration plant
that uses biomass and waste to reduce emissions,
Cal Poly is planning on shutting down
their cogeneration plant
in favor of going fully electric for heat,
using renewable energy.
This decision highlights the fact
that there are several ways
to make heating better for the environment.
District heating has competition.
Fuel oil produces 15% of global building heat.
Oil is typically delivered by tanker truck
and stored in above ground tanks.
The oil is burned in a furnace to produce heat.
This method of heating
produces a high amount of carbon emissions,
and even the trucks distributing the oil produces emissions.
The oil is also considered a hazardous material.
Globally, 42% of demand is met by burning natural gas,
and over 60% in the United States.
Natural gas has some benefits over fuel oil.
First, it can be delivered via pipe,
making it easy to get the product into buildings.
And it's cleaner burning than fuel oil,
though it still produces carbon emissions.
Some cities are even banning
the installation of gas lines in new homes
in an attempt to go completely carbon free
in their energy use.
Many of those carbon conscious cities
are acquiring electric heat.
This is better for the environment
in places where the electricity mix
is low carbon or fully renewable.
And globally, renewables hydro and nuclear
are making it viable for many places
to produce building heat without any emissions.
In the future, it seems highly likely that a city's heat
will be generated from electricity,
generated from renewable sources,
or from district heating and cooling
using biomass or municipal solid waste.
The great news is that the technology we need exists today
and will only get more efficient.
What's needed is the willpower to make these changes
and the resources to build super cool cogeneration plants
with ski hills in every city on the planet.
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