International. For the fifth time, the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA) has awarded the international city of the year award – Heat Pump. In 2015, Bitzer's customers, Calefa Oy, won the award thanks to a project in Mäntsälä, Finland.
The aim of the project is to efficiently exploit waste heat from a computer centre for district heating and to protect the environment. Heat exchangers first use the hot air extracted from the computer center to heat the water.
In the next step, heat pumps in a district heating installation raise the water temperature from 40 to 85°C. In this way, 75% of the energy originally used can be reused. This is not only very efficient, but also protects the environment. In the first phase, CO2 emissions will be reduced by 4,000 metric tons per year and, when the project is completed, this will be up to 11,000 tons of CO2 each year. Calefa's role in this is to allow all the technical conversion of waste heat into useful heat.
A special feature is that this is the first time that such a large amount of waste heat from a computer center can be exploited directly for district heating. To increase the water temperature to 85 ° C, in particular powerful and efficient heat pumps are required. This process is supported by 24 Bitzer six-cylinder Ecoline compressors at the heart of the heat pump system, which can each offer flow rates of up to 150 m3/h (at 50 Hz).
Today, with a total capacity of four megawatts, heat pumps supply about 1,500 homes with power. Subsequently, this will rise to about 4,000 households. Today, this system already meets the environmental targets of 40% CO2 emissions specified by the EU by 2030.
