Heat from London Underground tunnels will soon be used to warm homes in north London. The project could lead the way for district heating schemes across the UK capital to warm homes with cheap and low-carbon heat.
Image: Andrew Cowie/AFP/Getty Images
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Under a new scheme, warm air from a disused London Underground (Northern Line) station will support a heat network supplying about 1,000 homes and businesses by the end of 2019.
The scheme, a joint project between Islington Council, Transport for London (TfL) and engineering firm Ramboll, "will be a low-carbon energy source," a spokesman said, adding that it was also carrying out further research to identify opportunities for similar projects across the network.
A heat pump will capture "waste heat" from a ventilation shaft on City Road, which now pumps out air at 18C to 28C (64F to 82F), he said.
The project is the second phase of Islington's Bunhill Energy Centre, which already warms about 700 homes, Stephen Moore, communications and content officer at Islington Council, told DW.
Lily Frencham, head of operations at the Association of Decentralised Energy, told DW: "Using surplus heat rather than wasting it is a great way to ensure that we cut carbon emissions whilst helping people stay warm at an affordable cost.”
Power to the people
Enough heat is wasted in London to meet 38% of the city's heating demand, according to the Greater London Authority. With the expansion of district heating networks, this could rise to 63% of demand by 2050.
Architectural ideas against the heat
Global temperatures are soaring, with climate change leading to hotter summers each year. But can design and architecture help people escape the heat and combat the causes of global warming?
Image: picture alliance/DUMONT Bildarchiv
Air-conditioning is the problem, not the solution
Nothing feels nicer than walking into an air-conditioned room after spending hours in the heat. But the International Energy Agency (IEA) identified the use of A/C as one the key drivers of the growth of electricity demand, accounting for 10% of all global electricity consumption. And all that electricity that needs to be produced somehow — which often involves the burning of fossil fuels.
Image: picture-alliance
Tel Aviv's 'Geddes Plan'
Long before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes consulted the Zionist Commission in 1925 on how the future metropolis of Tel Aviv should be designed to minimize the effects of the desert heat. Its roads were to be built on a grid to channel the sea breeze from the Mediterranean into the city. To this day, the city center hugely benefits from this design.
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Bauhaus: German design is cool, literally
Buildings in Tel Aviv also benefited from the Bauhaus school of architecture and design, which puts an equal emphasis on pragmatism as it does on aesthetics. The Bauhaus penchant for flat roofs, for example, has proven to be useful as they reflect solar heat. With new technology such as the advent of solar panels emerging over time, flat roofs have continued to be popular in hot urban centers.
Image: DW/I. Rottscheidt
Nigeria's chill design
The influence of Bauhaus can be seen elsewhere as well. Israeli architect Arieh Sharon built Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria in the 1960s using Bauhaus ideas that have since become the staple of smart design. He addressed the tropical climate by creating space for open gardens and courtyards for the wind to move. Classrooms are always 7 degrees Celsius cooler than the outside temperature.
Image: Keren Kuenberg
Forward thinking: Barcelona
If courtyards provide cooler air, cities like Paris and Barcelona know the way forward. With their city blocks planned around giant courtyards, residents not only benefit from a cooler microclimate but also from living in pleasant surroundings. More recently, the city started changing the way it channels traffic around the more than 500 city blocks in a bid to reduce carbon emissions.
Residents of lower-lying coastal regions have known for a long time that building elevated houses — so-called stilt houses — provides protection against flooding, which is a growing side-effect of global warming. The setup also cools the buildings from underneath. Granted, it is difficult to retrofit existing structures this way, but if you're in the market for coastal property, think stilts!
Image: Reuters/S. Nesius
Building climate-resilient cities
The growing number of so-called natural disasters is directly linked to climate change. When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, the city benefited from the intelligent design of its 64-hectare Buffalo Bayou Park, which served as a flood plain bearing the brunt of the flooding. The park itself remained largely unscathed.
Image: Photo by Jim Olive, courtesy of Buffalo Bayou Partnership
Combating climate change and heat in the Middle East
Nowadays, there are cities springing up overnight in the Middle East, providing fresh opportunities to address the effects of climate change from the get-go. Next to Abu Dhabi's airport, there is an entire suburban city being built, designed to be run on renewable energy and have net-zero emissions. Masdar City might be a utopia today but could deliver the blueprints for tomorrow's urban designs.
Image: Masdar
Ancient design from Oman
The street temperature in Abu Dhabi's Masdar City neighborhood is up to 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the heat in the surrounding desert, as a wind tower channels cooler air from the sky and pushes it down to form a cooling breeze. This idea, however, is copied from the ancient city of Muscat, Oman, where taller buildings were designed to channel winds into narrow streets in a similar manner.
Image: picture alliance/DUMONT Bildarchiv
Fixer upper?
While old buildings are charming, they are often built in a way that maximizes the effects of high temperatures, inadvertently contributing to global warming. Some countries like the UK are pushing to retrofit these dwellings with improved insulation in a bid to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. Such building projects can be costly, with a "deep retrofit" coming at a price tag of €20,000.
Image: Imago/Future Image
Concrete: Hello or goodbye?
To address the climate needs of the future, people have to embrace new building materials. Above all, there's a call to stop the widespread use of concrete with its large carbon footprint. But existing concrete buildings, especially the giant Brutalist structures from the 1960s, are also great heat insulators. So in short: Stop using concrete but make the most use of existing concrete structures.
Image: DW/K. Langer
The future is actively passive
If you're building a house in the near future, think passive. Passive design incorporates features that minimize your impact on the environment. Think smaller windows, overhang roofs, space for solar panels or rooftop gardens, where the rain cools off your building while feeding plants that offset your carbon emissions. And they look great, too.
Image: Sam Oberter Photography
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The search for alternative sources of renewable heat has accelerated after the government's pledge to ban gas-fired boilers from new-build homes from 2025.
The project is one of several similar schemes across the UK to warm homes using waste heat from factories, power plants, rivers and disused mine shafts.
Waste heat
Tim Rotheray, director of the Association for Decentralised Energy, said district heating schemes were mushrooming across the UK as a low-cost tool in tackling the climate crisis.
"Almost half the energy used in the UK is for heat, and a third of UK emissions are from heating. With the government declaring that we must be carbon neutral within 30 years we need to find a way to take the carbon out of our heating system," he said.
British Sugar's factory in Wissington, Norfolk, pipes excess heat produced from cooking syrup into an 18-hectare (45-acre) greenhouse used to grow medical cannabis.
Stoke-on-Trent is working on a 52-million-pound (€57-million) project to tap energy from hot water deposits deep underground. Stoke city council estimates the scheme, which will be operational by the winter of 2020, could cut its carbon emissions by 12,000 tons a year.
In Edinburgh, engineers at Ramboll have come up with a plan to create a heat network using the water pooled in a disused mine as a giant underground thermal battery. The flooded mine system lies up to 500 metres (1,640 feet) below ground, and measures 8 km (5 miles) in length by 6 km wide.
Paul Steen, who proposed the project, says the mine water offers "massive potential" to help the city meet its sustainability goals.
Meanwhile, engineers in Glasgow have even found heat potential in the River Clyde. The city's 250-million-pound Queen's Quay regeneration project will include a project that uses heat pumps to extract heat from the river water and pipe it into a 2.5 kilometer long network that includes 1,400 homes, businesses and public buildings.
It may well provide a warm welcome to the delegates attending the UN climate talks in Glasgow next year.