On the WG site in West, residents want to get rid of natural gas with their own heat company in about four years. In the future, their heating may come from the Jacob van Lennep canal.
It is new and actually never seen before: an existing neighborhood that wants to switch from heating to natural gas to aquatherm. In that case, it concerns heat that is extracted from the surface water. On the WG site in West, the residents have their eye on the Jacob van Lennep Canal. Since Monday, their plan can count on a 7.7 million euros subsidy from Interior Minister Kajsa Ollongren.
The millions come from a subsidy that is intended for neighborhoods that are the first to get rid of gas. The roughly 2500 households on the site of the former Wilhelmina Gasthuis are thus taking a major step towards the investment of 24 million euros that, according to their own calculations, is needed to leave the central heating boiler and natural gas behind.
Affordable and in-house
Not that it is for them necessarily to do the latter. The group of about ten residents, who have been working on the plans for about 2.5 years, sees aquathermy simply as the best way to heat their neighborhood. “We think it can and should be done like this,” says chairman of the energy cooperative Ted Zwietering.
“Fine if it could lead to the neighborhood becoming free of natural gas,” says resident Annette Schermer, who acts as project manager. But for the residents it is not an end in itself. “We just want to make a favorable offer so that everyone here says: yes, I do. Because it is sustainable and because we keep control over our heating. And because it is also affordable as a result. ”
The first hurdle to overcome is the investment in a pumping station that extracts heat from the canal water in summer. This heat, from about fifteen to twenty degrees Celsius, is stored in two or three underground reservoirs (WKOs) and can be heated further at any time, until the middle of winter, with green electricity by about five neighborhood heat pumps. For use in households, water of sixty degrees is required. Small heat networks then distribute that warm water over the WG site.
This is possible for 60 percent of the city
The potential of aquathermy is great: according to Waternet calculations, the surface water contains enough heat to heat 60 percent of the city. The residents and Waternet are also given space on the WG site because no other solution is required to use natural gas. Tenants in the Van der Pekbuurt also want to get started with aquatherm, but there the Ymere housing association is working on the district heating that Vattenfall wants to install here.
Heating networks will become more efficient as more households connect. Conditions are favorable in the WG area. There is enough space between the residential complexes for the pipework. “You immediately have many connections if you have an entire building,” says Schermer.
It does not mean, however, that the soil under the plan will disappear if the entire neighborhood does not participate. About three hundred apartments can be heated per neighborhood heat pump, so the system can also slowly but surely expand. It is also advantageous that new housing blocks from the beginning of this century stand side by side with apartments that are much older. The new blocks have enough low temperatures and can therefore be connected to the return pipe of the older residential blocks.
A neighborhood meeting that was partly held online due to the corona virus was followed by some eighty residents earlier this month. “It has always been an active neighborhood,” says Schermer. “With a lot of knowledgeable people and they find each other easily,” says Zwietering. “We don’t say either: you have to join us to get rid of gas. We say: we offer a sustainable solution that is our own. ”
There is the foil brigade
The energy cooperative hires a specialist company for the technology. Construction will start in 2021 at the earliest, but residents have already started to save as much energy as possible. They help each other with an energy coach, a ‘foil brigade’ makes windows more insulating, cracks are closed and LED lamps are screwed in.
Unlike other heat networks, it is also in the interest of the energy cooperative to sell as little heat as possible. All the more is available for other local residents. A large-scale renovation that makes the houses less draughty and ready for economical heating with a low temperature can wait until a renovation is in the pipeline. “You don’t have to do it all at once,” says Zwietering.
The connection costs are kept low at around two thousand euros per home. “That’s about the cost of a new resume,” as noted at the neighborhood meeting. The energy cooperative mainly wants to calculate according to the use of heat, because that in turn stimulates the residents to improve their insulation. “The more they insulate, the better.”
