A total of 10,200 homes in 67 buildings in three neighborhoods of Valladolid will be heated from the winter of 2023 through a new heating network that will place the capital of Pisuerga as the leader in the country “with the highest percentage” of biomass in the energy mix of an urban fabric.
Heat networks have a significant degree of implementation in central and northern European countries and in recent years they have begun to unravel in the country with actions such as the one in Valladolid, which will require an investment of 36.3 million euros . Using biomass as fuel, thermal energy will be generated from a small ‘central’, which in the form of hot water will be distributed from there through underground pipes or branches that run under the streets until they reach the boiler rooms of the residential buildings, incorporating to its own circuits to cover the demand for heating and hot water.
A system, which in addition to generating clean energy – its implementation is equivalent to eliminating 400 chimneys that would emit 31,000 tons of CO2 – implies significant savings. The 30,000 residents of the neighborhoods of Parquesol, Villa del Pardo and Huerta del Rey who will join this heat network will see their heating and hot water bills drop by between thirty and fifty percent in the winter of 2023-2024.
This heat network -which will consume some 50,000 tons of wood chips per year, all of it with the Castilla y León denomination of origin-, will be the third largest in Spain fed with biomass and “will place Valladolid as the capital” of these systems that already they operate in the city on the campus of the University of Valladolid and the Clinical Hospital and the north-east area of Huerta del Rey. With them, in a complicated geopolitical context, it will be possible to advance in the substitution of dependence on fossil energies, by renewable, sustainable and indigenous biomass, in an autonomy with 51 percent of forest area, highlighted the Minister of Environment, Housing and Territorial Planning, Juan Carlos Suárez Quiñones, in the presentation of the project, whose first works will go out to tender tomorrow and will begin in the summer, informs Ical.
For his part, the mayor of Valladolid, Óscar Puente, has indicated that the residents’ savings may be greater due to the escalation of fossil fuels due to the war in Ukraine, and has appealed to lose dependence on third countries and these fuels.
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