Euroscientist
Summary
The increasingly apparent effects of climate change have motivated EU countries to investigate a range of novel ways to reduce energy consumption and encourage sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels. Ecoregions have emerged as a promising and practical means of accomplishing both goals. The EU-funded R-ACES project has established a number of pilot projects—with notable successes in Nyborg, Denmark, Antwerp, Belgium, and Bergamo, Italy. All locations are crucial business hubs and thus provide scalable insights that might conceivably be implemented elsewhere.
District heating and cooling networks play a huge role in utilising this excess energy. These localised networks of pipes transfer heat generated by power production and other fossil-fuel intensive processes to buildings, allowing them to regulate their temperature without additional energy expenditure. The same process can use cold water chilled using energy from waste heat during the summer months.
“Companies don’t know what their neighbours are producing or what they are wasting. So, we have to bring them together in order to share their knowledge about the flow of energy,” adds Sergio Pinotti, an energy efficiency expert with Spinergy SRL who has been working with R-ACES on the Bergamo, Italy ecoregion.
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