Ireland’s first large-scale district heating scheme, which would run off energy supplied by the large incinerator on Dublin’s Poolbeg Peninsula, could be ready to come into operation by 2025, Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan has said.
The Green Party leader said 90MW of heat could be generated at the waste to energy plant, operated by Encyclis, which would be sufficient to heat up to 50,000 homes in an efficient, environmentally responsible and sustainable manner.
District heating involves converting renewable energy into heat which can then be piped as boiling water to homes and other buildings in the immediate area. The process is well established in other countries – particularly in Scandinavia – but accounts for less than 1 per cent of the Irish heating sector.
The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland estimates that more than half of heat demand in Ireland – which includes hot water and all heating within a building – could be provided by district heating from renewable sources in future.
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Mr Ryan visited the Poolbeg facility near the Dublin docks on Thursday as a Government report setting out ambitious plans to introduce district heating throughout the State between now and 2050 was published.
He said a procurement process, to be run with Dublin City Council, would select an operator with a view to having the scheme up and running within the next two years.
The incinerator, which burns rubbish and converts it into energy, is currently being used to provide power to the national grid. However, waste heat currently flowing into Dublin Bay from the plant could also be used to pipe hot water into homes and businesses in the city centre, Dublin 2 and Dublin 4.
When the plant was built its specifications included boilers, turbines and condensers needed to provide district heating to the surrounding area. However, that part of the operation has yet to be commenced.
“I want it to be delivered before the end of 2025,” said Mr Ryan. “That’s absolutely possible. The waste heat from the incinerator could heat about the equivalent of 50,000 Dublin homes. That’s not small.”
He said the first area it could serve would be along the North and South Quays, where many large office developments have been constructed over the past decade and a half. He said the pipes needed to carry water from the plant along that section of the quays were already in place.
Mr Ryan said the system could, when all the infrastructure was in place, provide heating to all of the housing and developments on the nearby Glass Bottle site, to older Georgian houses in the historic core of Dublin – using the coal cellars as an access point – and to big projects such as the maternity hospital planned for Merrion Road.
The Minister said he wanted to see a large number of district heating projects developed in the coming decades.
“We’re gonna crack on and make sure we do deliver because we need to at a time of high energy prices. And there’s a time when we really need to cut emissions quickly. This is the best way to do it,” he said.
Kieran Mullins, project director at Encyclis in Ireland, said the plant had been designed and built with the equipment that allowed it to export electricity to power 110,000 homes and heat for 50,000.
“This plant will have a really positive impact from an environmental point of view with a reduction in carbon emissions of about 24,000 tonnes of CO2 when this plant is fully functional from the point of view of district heating,” he said.
“In the future people are going to have hot water on demand [from this plant]. We will be decarbonising the heat network and we are also going to be producing renewable energy.”
