12 ms·
The biggest heat pumps
- BoppreH 10mo ago> The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($2.3m; £176m). Browsing on mobile, I saw no way of contacting them about the mistake.
- unwind 10mo agoHeh came here to post the same comment, I was somewhat shocked by the alleged power of the almighty dollar ... but it's just a typo of course. Phew. :) According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoAt that rate the article will be eventually correct, give it few years
- esskay 10mo agoLooks like its already been corrected
- octocop 10mo agoDumb question, why is the water in the Rhine warm?
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoIt isn't. It's just warmer than air in winter
- alextingle 10mo agoThe air temperature isn't relevant.
- pbmonster 10mo agoIt is, since the obvious alternative to taking the heat from water would be taking the heat from the air or from the ground. The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.
- georgefrowny 10mo agoIt is a bit relevant because if the air was warm enough you would be better building huge air source heat pumps. And if it was really warm enough you wouldn't need heating in the first place.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Someone 10mo agoIt not warm as in ”warmer than the typical living space”, but it is warmer than zero Kelvin, so heat can be extracted from it. Doing that takes energy, that’s why it is called a heat pump. That moves heat from the water to an already warmer place, against a heat gradient, just as a water pump moves water against a gravity gradient. If the water were warmer than your typical living space, they wouldn’t need a heat pump; a water pump to pump the water closer to where heat is needed would be sufficient.
- kijin 10mo agoPractically, the water would need to be somewhat warmer than 0℃ because you don't want it to freeze and clog the plumbing after you have extracted a useful amount of thermal energy. :)
- ahofmann 10mo agoMoving water will get much colder than 0℃ before turning solid. -10℃ or even -25℃ are easily possible. If the water is also under pressure, it can get even colder.
- fsckboy 10mo agoI thought to supercool water, it needed to be completely still? am i confusing it with superheating?
- ahofmann 10mo agoI don't know much about water. I just remembered that rivers aren't freezing at all, even in harsh winters and searched a bit on the internet. To be honest, I'm writing this comment mainly to say: what a great user handle, I smiled :-)
- consp 10mo agoDepending on the contaminants, it's more likely a few degrees below 0C but you point still stands. Fish are removed as contaminant but minerals and pollution likely is not. And normal water takes quite a bit of heat extraction to actually freeze if at 0C, maybe the device does not even extract enough. But you want to be on the safe side of course since clogging up your heat exchanger with ice (which expands) is not great. (edit: and as noted in other reply pressure is a thing)
- greazy 10mo agoThe river is not warm or warmer than the air. Heat pumps are amazing at extracting thermal energy. I think water is very dense compared to air, thus making the processes more efficient in such a large scale.
- alextingle 10mo agoThe best thing about using watercourses as your heat source for heat-pumps - the water flow naturally takes away your "colder" output and brings you more "warmer". Ground source heat pumps are limited because the ground they have chilled stays stubbornly in the same place, so the only way you can extract more heat from it is to make it even colder, which gets less efficient. Watercourses don;t have that problem.
- georgefrowny 10mo agoThe opposite effect is also why thermal stations (including but not only nuclear) are usually on the coast or near large rivers: you can dump a lot of water heat into water and have it carried away. Not always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell. Sizewell C claims to plan recover waste heat and use it for carbon capture somehow, about which all I can say is a big old hmmmmm.
- kergonath 10mo ago> always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell. Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).
- crote 10mo agoIt has a decent bunch of thermal mass, so it takes quite a long time for it to reach air temperature during a cold snap or heat wave. This makes it a decent heat source during the winter and cold source during the summer - especially for short-term peaks. You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.
- calaphos 10mo ago> heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.
- willvarfar 10mo agoIn the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps. Apparently 95% of new heating installations in Swedish houses are heat-pumps these days: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC137131 https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1... Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable. PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D
- jack_tripper 10mo agoSign of a rich and very developed country. A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire. Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.
- wkat4242 10mo agoYes heat pumps are expensive and you need different radiators and more insulation than with traditional gas central heating. That's why it's an issue in Holland too. Not many people have the investment for all that. It's mainly worth it when you have solar panels but that requires another big investment. I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.
- wolvesechoes 10mo ago> more insulation Nothing to do with a heat source.
- sokoloff 10mo agoNot directly with the heat source, but with the output flow temperature that the heat source can create. In that regard, an air-to-water heat pump is much lower temperature than a gas or oil boiler can efficiently produce. That can cause a need for larger radiators to compensate and sometimes for insulation if the radiators can’t be further increased in size. (Or if the heat loss at design temp is too high for available or sensible sized equipment.)
- cyberax 10mo agoSo $235 million for 162MW, or $2.35B for 1.6GW A 1.6GWe nuclear reactor is around $8B.
- pjc50 10mo ago.. those are somewhat unrelated things, though?
- willvarfar 10mo agoA heatpump needs power to operate, but will generate at least 3x more heat than the electricity to power it. The article describes how there will be a water battery. So it can be thought of as a part of a bigger countrywide or europe-wide plan and grid?
- pjc50 10mo agoSure, but if you build a nuclear reactor suitably close to your city (!) it produces hot water directly in addition to electricity. It's just a much bigger pain to ship hot water over long distances than electricity.
- looofooo0 10mo agoIt was Philippsburg was 30km to Mannheim, Could have send 3GW of thermal energy over.
- renhanxue 10mo agoSweden's first commercial nuclear plant[0] was built right next to a newly constructed suburb precisely so that it could be used for district heating too. And also for producing small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, for... research purposes. Waste not, want not! (It didn't last very long and was shut down in the mid 1970's, for somewhat obvious reasons.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant
- masklinn 10mo ago
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago> ... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C. Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference. There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.
- looofooo0 10mo agoGermany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.
- Maledictus 10mo agoGuess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore. The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.
- looofooo0 10mo agoNo, this is a lie. It is also funny because Germany was so depended on Russian Gas that nuclear fuel even if fully depend on would be laughable. Germany has its own fuel enrichment and production, and it is still running https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urananreicherungsanlage_Gronau https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urananreicherungsanlage_Gronau And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!
- MrBuddyCasino 10mo agoThis problem could have been solved by breeder reactors. Now China is doing it instead of us.
- looofooo0 10mo agoWell that thing was never turned on in Germany.
- MrBuddyCasino 10mo agoThey not only developed it, but actually built it to completion, with the liquid Natrium circulating. It was ultimately stopped for political reasons by the SPD state government, and the usual cowardice of CDU/FDP.
- john61 10mo agoThere is a huge heat pump running in Vienna since 2019: https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-mitteleuropas-pumpt-in-wien-2/ https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m... a bigger one is planned: https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spatenstich-fur-grosswarmepumpe-bei-klaranlage-in-simmering/ https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...
- xg15 10mo agoA bit OT, but since this article also mentions district heating: Are there any efforts to attach any of the recently built AI data centers (and their power plants) to district heating networks?
- jimmaswell 10mo agoIf we all went full-in on nuclear we could use resistive heat and air cool datacenters all day with no concern for the cost. It's a shame.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoWe couldn't since all the capacity would go to AI, not to your home heating.
- AndrewDucker 10mo agoExcept that nuclear power is extremely expensive.
- john61 10mo agoIn Vienna, a hospital is heated by a neighboring data center using a heat pump, while the hospital cools the data center. https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/fernwaerme-zukunft/#Abw%C3%A4rmenutzung https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/fernwaerme-zukunft/#Abw%C3%A...
- renhanxue 10mo agoThose are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.
- jabl 10mo agoInteresting. In Helsinki the municipal energy company has a plant with 7 heat pumps which is slightly smaller at 160 MW heat and 100 MW of cooling. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2023/Waste-heat-plays-a-significant-role-in-a-sustainable-energy-system https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2023/Waste-heat-plays-a-signifi...
- renhanxue 10mo agoLooks like the expansion to 300 MW will have Stockholm beat soon if it hasn't already happened! Or is that in a different plant? Wasn't entirely clear to me, but great progress nonetheless!
- jabl 10mo agoMy understanding is that at the moment there's no expansion happening at the Katri Vala plant (the 160MW mentioned in the link above), the 300 MW is the total heat pump capacity spread out over half a dozen locations.
- fsckboy 10mo ago>energy from treated sewage wouldn't untreated sewage, still fermenting, be warmer?
- renhanxue 10mo agoMaybe. I guess it's easier to handle in treated form though. At the point where it gets to the facility it's actually not really sewage anymore, it's just clean water, so after passing the heat pumps it's just released into a nearby lake via a small turbine (both the sewage treatment plant and the heating plant ar located above the water level of the lake).
- rsynnott 10mo agoI am unsurprised that the big heat pumps are in Germany, because Germany as a country seems to be really into heat. As far as I can see, what is considered normal room temperature is about five degrees higher there than anywhere else.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoI keep wondering if instead of moving water they could use "solid state" heat pipes instead. Especially for geothermal where you could just drive them into ground, no need to actually drill or circulate water.
- yetihehe 9mo agoPipes moving water are cheaper than heat pipes, which are not "solid state", typically heat pipes contain a lot of water in liquid and vapour form under low pressure. If you wanted to move a lot of heat, you would need bigger pipes, which would need to withstand more force, so thicker. It's cheaper to just move that water with pump and if you place your inlet in proper place (higher than your machinery), you could even get some energy from flow of water.
- haeberli 10mo agoarchive.is paywall bypass link: https://archive.is/nQP9A https://archive.is/nQP9A
- acheron 10mo agoI've lived in a couple houses built in the 80s that had heat pumps. why do people keep acting like heat pumps are a new thing? i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.