Heat from crematoriums could be used to warm homes in ‘eerie’ new plan
HEAT from crematoriums could be used to warm nearby homes under proposals being put to city officials.
While acknowledging the idea might seem “eerie”, energy expert Donna Gartland said it made perfect sense. Heat generated by all sorts of activities was going to waste when it should be piped into people’s homes, she said.
Amazon has entered an agreement with South Dublin County Council to pump heat generated by the giant servers at one of its data centres to apartments and public buildings in Tallaght.
But Ms Gartland said 3,500 megawatts of waste heat in the form of steam and warm air had been identified around Dublin that could heat many thousands more homes and premises.
“We’re looking at data centres, cold storage warehouses, wastewater treatment plants, power stations – all of these units that produce waste heat from your bakeries right down to your local crematorium, even though that seems a bit eerie to think about waste heat coming from there.”
Ms Gartland is chief executive of Codema, the energy adviser to Dublin’s four local authorities, and also director of the Irish District Energy Association (IDEA), which is working to make district heating standard in every city and town.
District heating works best where development is dense or clustered to minimise the length and cost of pipelines and prevent heat loss along the way.
IDEA has calculated there is already enough development of that kind in Ireland to allow for 33pc of heat needs to be met from district heating. With a proper nationwide plan
in place, that figure could rise to 57pc.
Ms Gartland said heating infrastructure should be part of national policy and state funding, the way gas pipelines and electricity networks are.
She called for mandatory heat planning at local level so that new developments had to provide for district heating, and she said building regulations needed to be revised.
“Because waste heat doesn’t tick the renewable energy box, the building regulations don’t value it in the same way,” she said.
The potential for district heating was laid out at a conference on Ireland’s climate action ambitions where speakers repeatedly stressed how far behind the country is in meeting climate targets.
We were to have 12pc of heating needs met from renewable sources by 2020 but we managed only half that. We were also to have cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 20pc by 2020 compared to 2005 but even with activity slowed because of Covid, the reduction when formally calculated later this year is expected to be just a few percent.
Professor John FitzGerald, of the Climate Action Advisory Council, appealed to the research community to speak out about climate.
“The work of Irish scientists in spelling out the implications for Ireland is hugely important,” he told the conference.
“The Irish political system takes scientific research seriously although it has thus far been very slow to take action.
“Researchers need to communicate their results and their advice to the wider public. It is not sufficient to publish key findings in academic journals and rely on these results finding their way to the civil service and the wider public by osmosis.”