The Rhine is the second-longest river in Western Europe, discharging about 100,000 cubic feet of water a second into the North Sea.
It snakes through the Swiss Alps and makes up large sections of Germany’s western border with France, spreading out across a major delta in the Netherlands before emptying into the ocean.
It’s also an enormous, largely untapped resource for clean power. As the BBC reports, a German energy company called MVV Environment is building two enormous heat pumps that draw water from the Rhine to provide an appreciable 40,000 homes with heat.
The pumps, which could be the most powerful in existence once completed, work in more or less the same way as heat pumps currently being used by single homes. They draw in heat from outside air in winter, or move heat out to act like an air conditioner in summer, through a system that consists of a compressor, refrigerants, coils, and fans.
The advantages are evident. Heat pumps are generally speaking significantly more energy efficient and therefore more environmentally friendly than alternative methods used to heat and cool homes, like gas boilers or electric elements.
The idea is to spread the generated heat to thousands of homes via large hot water or steam heating networks. According to the International Energy Agency, “district heating could cover up to 50 percent of the heating demand in Europe, and heat pumps could deliver around 25 percent of the energy transported by the district heating grid.”
Fittingly, the enormous pumps being built by MVV are taking over the site of a coal power plant in Mannheim, Germany, a symbolic shift towards renewable and less polluting technologies. Conveniently, MVV officials noted that the site is already hooked up to the grid and even the local district heating network.
Best of all, the necessary compressor technology has already been largely developed by the oil and gas industry, giving the transition to enormous centralized heat pumps a considerable leg up.
The company is hoping to kick off construction next year and be completed two to three years later.
It’s one of several heat pump-based solutions in the works across Europe. A similar system is already in the works in the town of Aalborg, Denmark. Heat pumps are also being used to extract heat from water in unused mines in the UK.
Other places, like Helsinki, Finland, are already harvesting the heat from the surrounding air for the local district heating system.
However, cost remains a considerable drawback as heat pumps remain extremely expensive to produce. The Mannheim heat pumps are expected to cost an eye-watering $235 million — making it a costly, but ultimately worthwhile, solution.
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