SORCER Site Hillerød

The following information has been gathered as part of the CONCERTO Premium policy research.

Benefits of CONCERTO:

Key benefits:

Development of low temperature district heating areas is a prerequisite for the future supply of low energy houses. This is used by consulting engineering companies, city planners and utility companies in making the energy supply for the cities of the future. Much increased awareness in the municipality concerning low energy measures in both their own buildings and in terms of the municipal planning (where it is now a requirement to build low energy buildings). Ullerødbyen is seen as a green area where it is possible to get in touch with nature and still be close to the city. Klaverfabrikken which is a local music venue has received enormous attention for becoming the first CO2-neutral music venue in Europe (or the world). This has resulted in very positive awareness of what it means to be CO2-neutral.

Skill development:

In the municipality the administrative staff working with energy in terms of both building permits and operation of municipal buildings improved their skills. As an example the team that issues building permits have been through extensive teaching concerning low energy buildings. In the utility company they have improved their business cases concerning low temperature district heating systems. The utility company has also started using biomass, which they did not do before.

In COWI the low temperature district heating system was used as basis for further development of new solutions for district heating supply. Also the monitoring principles used in the project resulted in new skills for persons in COWI

In Klaverfabrikken a large number of staff and volunteers are now aware of the advantages of PV. An unknown number of citizens in Hillerød have learned about the advantages of low energy buildings and PV. The project partners Weiss and DTU (Technical University of Denmark) developed the two-stage gasifier.

Local economic effects: For planning and project work 7 full-time equivalent (FTE) person-years were required for the planning and construction of the CONCERTO project.

Barriers encountered:

Technical barriers:

The delivery of the gasifier which is based on new technology took  much longer than expected to finish, and therefore the production was delayed significantly. The low energy class 1 buildings (7.000 m² in the project) had problems with too high energy consumption and bad thermal indoor climate together with draught problems. Installing monitoring equipment as specified by CONCERTO Plus (and later Premium) was a very costly matter, which in some cases cost the same as the support which was paid to each house owner as a scale of unit cost. This made it very hard to justify installation of detailed meters   

Solutions: For the gasifier it has been decided to wait for the finalization of the plant. Towards the end of the project low energy buildings have been standard constructions. Two or three meters have been installed for each household, which means that some of the values must be estimated based on previous/other knowledge

Economic barriers:

Little interest in private construction from 2007 to 2010, which was the most vital period in the project in terms of getting buildings finished and entered into the project. For the gasifier it was close to not being constructed due to a high price compared to the income it is expected to generate during operation

Solutions: Two major changes to the SORCER project to change the project from mainly dwellings to also include other types of buildings. The gasifier was included after all after a careful examination and feasibility study compared to alternative solutions.

Social barriers:

There was little interest in participating in the project for the developers in Ullerødbyen in the beginning of the project. Users in the low energy class 1 buildings were disappointed in the project results, as they had problems heating their buildings and avoid draught.

Solutions: Meetings were held with the developers to get them interested in the project. This was done in 2010 and 2011 and resulted in much greater interest from the developers as low energy buildings were also much more common. Meetings, surveys and careful analysis of the situation were conducted. This improved the situation somewhat.

Administrative barriers:

In the project a large number of single-family houses were included which led to a large number of contracts and difficulties in project reporting.

 

Success factors identified:

Technical Success Factors:

The project basis in this project was the fact that Ullerødbyen should have low energy buildings supplied by low temperature district heating. The heat to the city should come from solar thermal, biomass boiler and CHP gasifier. This concept proved to be a success throughout the project in spite of the changes.

A "negative" success was that monitoring of the low energy class 1 buildings participated in ensuring that a ban has been introduced in Denmark on using air-to-air heatpumps as the only heat source. This is important as air-to-air heatpumps have proven to be very inefficient (and too small) when it is very cold outside.

Social success factors:

Ullerødbyen was seen as a very successful area due to the green areas surrounding the buildings. Klaverfabrikken was a huge success from a disseminative point of view with good positive stories in the media about the fact that they became carbon neutral.

Institutional success factors:

The utility company realized during the project that installing solar thermal fields in different places in the city strengthens the district heating grids to improve security of supply and lower heat losses. After the first plant which was supported by the SORCER project, three more plants have been installed where only one of these was supported by SORCER funds.

 

Business models used:

For EE projects no specific business model was used, except that business models helped towards reducing the cost of the low energy building.

For PV (photovoltaic) systems, these more or less sold themselves due to the so-called "nettomålerordning" (energy meter roll back scheme) which implies that the production of the PV makes the energy meter spin backwards. In other words the value of the production is the same as the cost of the production. This was a very good funding scheme for the owner of the system. However it ensured that several of the systems were installed in the CONCERTO area.

For the RES systems it was a decisive factor that the plants can produce heat cheaper than the price of the heat from the local CHP plant which was based on natural gas. It is generally speaking not allowed to claim a higher price of heat because it is based on renewable sources.

 

Legacy – follow-on projects:

As stated above, the utility company installed three solar thermal fields of around 500-800 m² throughout the city (one with CONCERTO-finance). A new building complex similar to the low energy class 1 houses in Ullerødbyen was planned, but based on different heat supply technology - without the air-to-air heatpumps. A second gasifier is already being built in Hillerød (based on another technology, but this would probably not have happened without SORCER). 

 

Legacy - Policy Developments:

As a result of the monitoring in the low energy class 1 buildings, the use of air-to-air heat pumps was banned as the only heating source in Danish buildings used for all year occupancy. The results added to similar results from other projects. The reason is that the heat pumps cannot supply sufficient heat when it is really cold outside - and at the same time the COP is extremely low.