Wastewater Utilities
You can become Energy Heroes by allowing others to recycle the heat that you receive for free
You probably know how warm sewer pipes are when it's cold outside. Here is a quote we received from a former wastewater utility manager; "Anyone who has ever performed confined space entry into a sewer during the winter months, understands the value of this heat. Team members would often argue about who would get to go into the warm sewer and who would have to stay topside and freeze."
The constraint which is rapidly becoming critical for us all is time. A good analogy is the famous 'square peg in a round hole' scene from the Apollo 13 movie, where CO2 levels in the spaceship were reaching dangerous levels (sound familiar?). The managers threw a collection of items on the table and staff were told to come up with a solution because time was limited. It's the same situation here on our spaceship (Earth) where we are in space and CO2 levels are reaching dangerous levels. The collection of items we have available are: people, equipment, money, limited energy and limited time. Failure is not an option!
Decarbonisation of cities will require require a large shift to electrification for heating buildings, but transportation is also shifting to electrification. So city energy planners have a competing demand. City electrical supplies and distribution networks are coming under increasing pressure to cope with these shifts and changes in demand. And time keeps ticking away....
But cities have wastewater networks collecting and carrying huge amounts of free low grade heat. This heat energy is reliable, predictable, stable and already where it is needed by buildings, and your infrastructure that is collecting and transporting this heat is already constructed (the sewer network). Your heat energy is sadly invisible, so it is just ignored and flushed away every day. The favorable temperatures of wastewater allow wastewater source heatpumps to operate more efficiently than air source heatpumps. So when buildings capture and recycle wastewater heat using heatpumps, it allows them to stop burning fossil fuels and electrification of more buildings to be achieved using less electricity (so helping manage the growing demands on the electrical infrastructure). Win/Win/Win for the environment, the buildings and electrical authorities.
A view over a wastewater treatment plant during cold ambient conditions.
You Hold The Keys to an Amazing (and Valuable) Energy Resource
The amount of thermal energy available within wastewater is enormous.
Typically 20%-35% of total housing energy + up to 40% of low temperature heat used in commercial & industrial sectors gets turned into hot water, which then goes into a city's sewers.
So there are enormous amounts of low carbon heat available in every city's wastewater network.
This energy flows through pipes which are already constructed and they are located in the city (where heating & cooling energy is needed).
But this energy is invisible and tragically normally simply flushed away everyday.
For a sustainable world, we need to stop this energy waste and recycle the heat.