Savosolar has been selected as general contractor to build the largest solar thermal system in Finland to date, on behalf of Suur-Savon Sähkö Oy for its district heating network in Puumala, which supplies households with healthy heating. In this hybrid installation the solar thermal system is producing both, high-temperature heat to district heating supply pipe and also low-temperature heat to improve heat pump plant COP.
A new forerunner project on the large scale solar thermal market in which Savosolar has been involved: The first solar thermal field with double glasses collectors on trackers. This innovation has been done to optimize the annual solar production with a limited available area. This new solar thermal plant is a property of newHeat and will delivered heat the network of the city of Pons, which is managed by Dalkia.
Savosolar supply on this project consist in the complete solar field field as a turnkey solution, it means, the design, the supply and the installation of the solar collectors and its trackers, as well as the piping, until the solar station. It represents 112 Savo 15 DG-M collectors, which will reduce of 210 tons per year the CO2 emissions for the city’s heat needs.
Jelling Varmeværk is a Danish district heating plant in the historical village of Jelling, which is the former home of the Viking Chief Harald Bluetooth. Apart from the 20,125 m² collector field, Jelling Varmeværk produces its energy from a 1 MW wood chip boiler, a 1.5 MW absorption heat pump and 2 gas CHP engines with a total capacity of 8 MW heat and 6 MW electricity.
The first solar system was commissioned in summer 2016 and during its first week of operation, the collector field set a new Danish record by producing nearly 5 kWh/m² in a day.
The collector field in Jelling has double stanchions which allows for two collector rows to connect to one and the same pipe and thereby save costs and thermal losses. The annual solar thermal production is about 11,200 MWh, which covers over 25% of the town’s energy need for heating.
In 2018, Jelling Varmeværk placed a second order with Savosolar for the 4,836 m² extension of the successfully running existing collector field. The extension will be installed in first half of 2019 and it will further grow the fraction of district heating produced with solar energy.
“We chose Savosolar as our collector supplier due to their high efficiency in combination with their innovative solutions. They enable us to have an environmentally friendly, stable and low price for heating over the next 20 years. Collectors have integrated hose connections which means that they disturb the landscape as little as possible in an historic village of Jelling. The collectors can also follow the curvature of the landscape which means that we didn’t have to level out the ground of the field.”
FORS A/S is an energy company owned by three Danish municipalities. Their district heating plant in Jyderup has about 900 customers and produces about 5000 MWh solar thermal energy per year. For the rest of its energy production, the plant uses two gas boilers with 7 MW thermal capacity and two gas engines with 6 MW electrical capacity.
In Jyderup, the collector field is 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. The collector field also has double stanchions which allows for two collector rows to connect to one and the same pipe and thereby save costs and thermal losses.
