Helsinki has all its hot water on tap

The Times
April 15, 2009
Robin Pagnamenta, Energy and Environment Editor

A driver leans out of his car and swipes a card to open an unmarked steel door. Blasted from the bedrock, a road descends steeply into a long cavern, bristling with machinery, banks of lights and high-tech equipment.
This is not the lair of a criminal mastermind in a James Bond story, but the nerve centre of the world's most sophisticated coal-fired central heating system.
From here, a 1,350km network of tunnels, pipes and pumping stations supplies hot water to more than half a million people in Helsinki, one of the world's coldest capital cities.
“It's a fantastic system,” says the newly arrived driver, Marko Riipinen, director of district heating for Helsingi Energia, the municipal utility that operates the system.

“It's highly efficient, environmentally friendly and the price of heat is comparatively low.”
In Helsinki, where winter temperatures often plunge to -30C (-22F), hardly anyone owns a domestic heating boiler. Instead, water is heated centrally at combined heat and power (CHP) plants to 115C and piped directly to tens of thousands of homes and public buildings.
“We can handle the whole system from a single control room,” Mr Riipinen says, placing his hand on a metre-thick pipe. More than 90 per cent of the total heating needs of Helsinki, including hot tap water and heat for homes, offices and factories, comes from the same shared network.
It is a vastly more efficient use of energy than in Britain, where 50 per cent of the energy produced in power stations burning coal and gas is routinely lost as heat, usually emitted directly into the air via chimney flues. In contrast, at Helsingi Energia's gleaming CHP plant in the suburb of Vuosaari, up to 93percent of the energy produced is converted into either electricity or hot water for district heating. That makes it the most efficient power station in the world, says Mr Riipinen.
“To us [the British system] seems very wasteful,” he says. “Finland doesn't have any of its own coal, gas or oil so we have to import everything from Russia or Poland. So we have really learnt that we have to use it in the best way possible.”
It is a model system that Britain, which aims to slash emissions of carbon dioxide by 80per cent by 2050, would do well to emulate. But Mr Riipinen says the problem for countries trying to copy Finland's system is the need to build the pipeline infrastructure, an effort that in Helsinki began in the 1950s and is continuing.
“You need that distribution network,” says Mr Riipinen, who adds that the system can switch between being powered by coal, gas or oil.
The system is supplemented by the world's largest underground coal storage facility, where 250,000cu m of the fuel can be stored in caverns lying 124m below sea-level.
Britain has been trying to encourage the development of CHP and district heating for years, but progress is slow, in part because of the high cost and complexity of fitting the country's ageing housing stock with the necessary equipment.
The big six energy companies, which operate lucrative domestic boiler servicing businesses, also appear lukewarm on the development of such a scheme. Nevertheless, the Government is keen to do more and a new subsidy arrangement is due to come into effect in 2011. It is also conducting a consultation on the subject, which is scheduled to end next month.