Low-temperature waste heat enabling abandoning coal in Espoo district heating system

Espoo has set a goal to abandon the use of coal in its district heating system by the year 2025. The local district heating operator is producing a major share of Espoo's heat demand with combined heat and power units, but a large share of that thermal capacity will be closed by 2025. The plan is to replace the closed down capacity with renewable fuels, heat pumps and waste heat utilisation. The goal of this paper is to simulate the impacts of these emission reductive acts on the production costs and CO₂ emissions of the system. The possibility of utilising waste heat from data centres in the district heating system is evaluated. The results show that abandoning coal in the city's heating system leads to a significant reduction of CO₂ emissions with a small increase of annual production costs. Waste heat enables emission reductions even further, and the increase of production costs can be prevented.