Savosolar delivered -once again- the largest solar thermal installation in Finland. This system is located way North in Tupos, Liminka - less than 200 km from the Arctic Circle.
The heating load of Tupos district heating is usually covered by wood pellets. Yet during summer time, the load is often so low, that the substantial wood pellet burner cannot be properly used and an oil burner got used, instead. The special challenge here has been to design a very efficient solar thermal system that could replace the oil consumption in summer to run the district heating network almost completely fossil-free.
Ystad Arena is located in the southern Swedish city of Ystad, and is the home arena of Ystad IF HF which is one of the country’s top handball teams. On its roof, 36 collectors from Savosolar were mounted during spring 2017. The system is owned and maintained by the municipality owned energy company Ystad Energi AB, and feeds its district heating network with clean thermal energy. Ystad Energi AB is working towards the goal of becoming fossil fuel free by 2020 and currently produces ca. 160,000 MWh of thermal energy annually, of which 97-99% are based on bio-fuels.
As much as 89% of the thermal energy for the district heating network is produced by four wood chip burners between 3 and 10 MW capacity and the rest is produced from straw, rapeseed, gas and oil. Ystad Energi AB has ca. 1,850 customers, of which ca. 1,300 are single family homes.
Savosolar has been selected to deliver a tracker mounted solar thermal plant for the district heating of Nansha, Guanghzou, China. The system is combined with a geothermal seasonal storage and a chiller (not in Savosolar’s scope of supply) which allow the owner to deliver healthy energy, both heating and cooling, to its customers.
Lolland forsyning’s district heating plant in Søllested is located on the island of Lolland and was the first installation, where Savosolar’s double glazed collectors were used. The double glazing reduces heat losses through the glass side of collector and offers a higher efficiency, especially at higher operation temperature levels and during the darker months of the year. Søllested district heating plant has ca. 500 customers and also uses a 5 MW straw boiler and an oil burner to produce its heat.
The collector field in Søllested has a so-called hybrid field, with both single and double glazed collectors. The single glazed collectors are in the cold end of the collector rows and increase the low temperature as rapidly as possible, while the double glazed collectors are located in the warm side of the collector rows where it is more important to reduce the heat losses.
In Søllested, Savosolar was faced with a special challenge since the customer’s land has a sewerage pipe running through it. Since the owner of the sewer pipe needs to be able to access it in case of maintenance, Savosolar supplied a collector field which both optimised the use of the available land, while still providing access to the sewer pipe
