https://julkaisut.hel.fi/en/reports/environmental-report-202...
It looks like the emissions for the Helsinki area are 2,345 kt per year, so I guess 21 kt is only a small part of that.
Of course, no one project should be expected to solve everything! But it is depressing to see the scale of the problem.
Presumably 50 is in April or May and 90 is in August or September. Or are these swings shorter-term ?
I'm not sure if I should be assuming Fahrenheit or Celsius? The article isn't clear on the units here.
Thought was seldom given to re-using heat (let alone storing it) after its primary purpose. (I don't recall ever seeing any meta-survey of the scope of this near-blindness ... but it has to have become enormous ...) Home-heating solutions have usually been limited to the cost for consumers rather than the environment. That will have to change drastically.
Bonus points if one uses the waste heat from e.g. industrial plants to help heat up the water.
The only advantage seawater usually has is it’s ’free’ if you’re on the coast. But in many habitable climates, freshwater is ‘free’ too. Like most of Finland.
Finland has vast stores of fresh water and annual precipitation has nothing to do with it.
Fresh water makes the entire project much cheaper.
And this water is supposed to be fed directly into the homes of hundreds of thousands of customers through the existing district heating network which obviously isn't built with seawater in mind. A seawater storage facility would at the very least require a heat exchanger which would decrease efficiency.
Or is it the the sun and rain that created the lakes?
Thanks to the last ice age and retreating glaciers...
The fact that they are still full of water is due to them being replenished by precipitation more than they lose water. If they would lose more water then what flows into them we would be speaking about the "land of many bone dry holes" in the famous Finnish desert.
They mention they are recovering heat from waste water. Obviously, they aren't pumping waste water into the system but rather use heat exchange to extract energy.
Don’t want to kill all those underground pipes with mineral buildup as things precipitate out as it cools.
No, the only cost really is the cost of heat exchanger and maybe energy to pump water through the heat exchanger. Heat exchange approaches 100% thermal efficiency with large enough heat exchanger.
Not really, heat pumps as a transfer method can achieve better total efficiency and make distribution of the heat easier.
https://www.slideshare.net/HelsinginEnergia/innovation-and-s... (slide 21)
My favorite so far has been Vienna - I would describe it as similar to Evian.
Estonians will say they wonder why the heck it takes a Finn twice as long as an Estonian to say the same thing.
Also, I'm not sure if it's a thing in Estonian, but I've heard in Lithuania or Latvian there's no distinction between spoken and written language.
Example from Finnish:
* Minä means I/me in written Finnish
* Mä/Mää/Mie/... is what people typically use in spoken language
Which is what some of my international friends have been complaining about the Finnish courses at my university -- that they learn the written Finnish from their 101 books, but it's not so useful since in daily interactions people just use spoken Finnish.
And well maybe the minä -> mä you can see the length difference. Maybe Estonian is just more advanced in the "spoken-ness", if you will, of the language.
Here you can see the different "minä"s by region in Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20010020. The article's in Finnish, but just scroll down and you can still very much understand the map.
Here's the article Google-translated to English, but I'm not sure if it would also translate the "minä"s: https://yle-fi.translate.goog/a/74-20010020?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x...
Minä -> mä is Mina -> Ma (meaning "me")
Meie -> Me (meaning "us")
Tema -> ta (meaning "him/her")
I once did a duolingo course on Finnish and was surprised to find how much of it is almost literally the same, both in having almost the same amount of cases (we have 14, Finnish has 15), and that the overall structure is the same, meaning the biggest hurdle for me to learn Finnish is not so much the langauge, but the vocabulary. While a lot of Finnish words are almost identical in Estonian, there's also quite a few that actually mean things in Estonian, but totally different things than in Finnish.
A funny (or not funny?) example is "Raiska pappi", which in Estonian means "Spend/waste money", but in Finnish means "raping priest" or something like that.
The water pumping and maintenance costs are likely going to be their largest ongoing costs, no?
They’re looking to make cheap use of the existing waste heat, after all, which while ‘low quality’ is high enough quality for district heating already.
Heating emissions for a city at 60° North are a big challenge to reduce, and combined heat and power is a huge efficiency gain - the heat is otherwise wasted, and thermal emissions are an environmental issue in their own right.
The emissions could be reduced much further if they decrease the 55% of their generation that comes from fossil fuel fired CHP plants[1], and increased their nuclear capacity from current 27% (unfortunately they had to cancel a plan to build another reactor because their partner was rosatom[2])
[1] https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#React...
Helsinki shut down one coal plant used for district heating this spring and is shutting down the last remaining one next spring, well ahead of schedule.
https://www.hel.fi/en/news/helen-phases-out-coal-more-than-f...
I personally am bullish on deep geothermal - there was a pilot project near Helsinki which was unfortunately unsuccessful, but with cheaper new drilling tech (plasma etc) I think this can work out in the future. https://www.st1.com/st1s-otaniemi-geothermal-pilot-projects-...
There are also some startups looking to build small modular nuclear reactors for district heating - https://www.steadyenergy.com/
Given that governments and utilities operate with finite budgets, for each € invested in nuclear, we’re actually much better off investing in lower-cost, lower-risk projects and technologies (renewables, electrification, heat pumps, grid upgrades, insulation, storage, etc) that deliver more carbon savings per € spent much more quickly.
To put this in perspective: you could build on the order of 1000 Mustikkamaa heat caverns for the price of one nuclear plant!
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think all those are key, and need to be focused on immediately. Those help to reduce demand, but (with the exception of renewables) don't help improve supply. If we want to eliminate carbon emissions worldwide, nuclear will be a key component (along with massive renewables). For example, the Japanese grid has been developing various renewables on superdrive since 2011, yet they are only at 20% renewable, with national carbon emissions ~500gCO2/kWh - dramatically higher than when their nuclear fleet was operational. Germany has been pushing renewables for close to two decades, but they closed down their nuclear plants and are similarly at ~500gCO2/kWh. France has had a nuclear-based grid for a couple decades and while it has its own issues, their emissions intensity is ~50gCO2/kWh. Ontario is hydro and nuke, they're ~100gCO2/kWh (some storage and more renewables would help them dramatically reduce emissions from gas, but current conservative premier spent billions scrapping that plan)
> To put this in perspective: you could build on the order of 1000 Mustikkamaa heat caverns for the price of one nuclear plant!
Yes, all you need is 1000 old oil storage caverns already dug sitting there waiting to be filled with water...
To give you some sense of the enormity of the change, China over the first 9 months of 2023 built 215 TWh of wind and PV (numbers already adjusted for capacity factor), which eclipses the combined 206 TWh of every single nuclear power plant they have under construction today (there are 26 of them.)
Moaning about individual "cognitive dissonance" is absolute nonsense when talking about global scale problems that require policy solutions. The activists' intuitions are more correct than yours, I'd wager. Climate change is not an engineering problem.
If they were protesting the government to massively increase oil taxes then you might have a point. Alas, they don’t have any economic intuition.
Is it more or less hypocritical than someone who pays lip service to climate change, flies 3-4 times a year and doesn't go to sit ins? Their total overall alignment of their actions and their words are probably greater than vast majority of people who also don't even consider emissions from flying but say they care about climate change.
It's legitimate to agitate for change at a higher level while maintaining individual behaviours that align with status quo.
That’s like saying the catholic priest is more aligned with their sermons, even if they’re having random hookups too?
I'm bothered that anti-oil westerners are unaware of how heavily their existence is subsidized by oil. Every part of life we take for granted exists because of readily available petroleum. Western students are taught the environmental consequences of fossil fuel burning without ever really learning the degree to which every first-world nation in the world relies on petroleum for plastic, fertilizer, fuel for shipping food/fuel/goods, etc. For the record, I would like to divest from oil wherever possible, but I am actually ready to give up many of the modern benefits of the oil-consuming first world. I don't think the people I know who sit in at the banks are.
It also benefits a tiny part of the global population so per user it's actually not that small of an impact.
If the energy would just be lost otherwise, you might as well go all the way to 100℃?
That's at 1 atm, perhaps the water is a bit pressurized as well?
A bit further down there's this confusing quote though:
> District heat is stored in two rock caverns in Mustikkamaa. The temperature of the water in the caverns varies between 50 and 90 °C.
I suppose in such a large storage vessel, most of the water is naturally pressurised by its own weight. So most of it won't boil, even at 100°C, except right at the surface?
Steady Energy is a spin-off from VTT (Finnish state technical research centre) - I haven't followed it too closely but they are legit. https://www.ldr-reactor.fi/en/development/
Can't be much worse than building another large scale nuclear plant with the French :D (which is what we did with the last one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... - 4x over budget and 14 years behind schedule)
Most large construction projects suffer when there is too great a separation between design and construction. There needs to be feedback from one to the other, and when it takes 30 years to go from conceptual design to operational reactor, that feedback loop just isn't there. One big promise of SMRs is for components to be prefabricated - if you're building multiple of an object, the connection between design and construction will be much closer.
In case anyone needs it spelled out: train and boat travel are vastly more energy efficient than air travel.
If you want to bleat nonsense about imagined 50% inflation, please go do it on twitter.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-...
> The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.
> Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course. Naughten, the Antarctic-ice scientist, reminded me that “climate is a spectrum; it isn’t an on/off switch.” Whenever we do make a different set of decisions, ones that make the math properly compute, we will be saving what we have left, preventing some layer of livability from being irrecoverably sloughed off and swept away.