Renewables and District Heating: Eastern Europe Keeps It Warm

By Rachana Raizada, Contributor
13 September 2012  

 

MILAN -- Long after the Iron Curtain was lifted, Europe's ex-Soviet nations often remain reliant on combined heat and power (CHP) plants feeding district heating schemes for which renewables could make an attractive fuel source.

A legacy of centralized economic planning guided by the objective of providing universal access to housing and utilities, district heating (DH) traditionally played the starring role in urban heating systems in the planned economies behind the Iron Curtain.

The first Soviet electrification plan of 1920 and successive five-year plans emphasized cogeneration and waste heat recycling from turbine steam for district heating of urban residential areas and industrial facilities. Fuel savings at electric power stations — the major producer of waste heat — were an important performance indicator for the Soviet Ministry of Power and Electrification.

With a domestic oil economy devastated by its civil conflict, many of Russia's first power plants used peat for lack of alternatives. But growing urbanization and the development of the oil and gas industry after World War II led to the dominance of fossil fuels for DH across the communist bloc.

With the transition to market economies after the collapse of the Soviet system, these same countries, some of which have since joined the E.U., must grapple with the task of modernizing these networks without neglecting ambitious environmental targets amid difficult economic times and rising energy prices.

Euroheat and Power — the European industry association for the CHP and district heating and cooling sectors — estimates in its 2011 survey that in 2009 the share of citizens served by DH totalled 64 per cent in Latvia, 60 percent in Lithuania, 53 per cent in Estonia, 50 percent in Poland, 41 percent in Slovakia, 38 per cent in the Czech Republic, 23 percent in Romania, 17 percent in Slovenia and 10 percent in Croatia.