Meeting Net Zero Carbon Emission Targets: A case study tailored to local industry

This paper demonstrates the opportunity for UK local authorities to utilise waste heat from local industry to accelerate their success with meeting net zero emissions targets. It presents the results of a feasibility study for an urban area in Yorkshire, UK aimed at driving clean growth and decarbonisation in local industry together with investment in low carbon energy systems. This is an ambient loop district heating network design with sharing of heating between buildings and heat recovery from a local industry source, including mine water. This adapts the GreenSCIES concept developed initially for Islington, London, tailored to local council demands and local industry energy sources. The scheme would be based on a low temperature heat network with large, decentralised heat pumps to raise temperatures to that required in the connected buildings/dwellings. The heat source is low-grade waste-heat from a local glassworks which is readily accessible with minimal disruption to 24/7 operations. The scheme considered thermal storage and the integration of a 20MW solar PV farm and a 10MW windfarm. The results show that that it is possible to decarbonise large parts of the borough including their social housing stock. In addition, using old mine workings as a means of storing and recovering heat, allows seasonal storage of heat to act both as back-up and top-up to the heat available from the glassworks. This novel approach uses natural resources and builds on local industry to accelerate economic regeneration paving the way to net zero carbon emissions.