The kick-off meeting of WEDISTRICT was held October 2-3rd, 2019 in Madrid (Spain). WEDISTRICT is an EU project that stands for “Smart and local reneWable Energy DISTRICT heating and cooling solutions for sustainable living“.
The overall objective of WEDISTRICT is to demonstrate DHC as an integrated solution that exploits the combination of RES, thermal storage and waste heat recycling technologies to satisfy 100% of the heating and cooling energy demand in new DHC and up to 60-100% in retrofitted DHC. For this purpose, the focus of WEDISTRICT is large-scale replication of best practice: better valorisation of local resources. In parallel, systems will evolve to provide even more flexible solutions by the integration of innovative molten-salts based thermal storage, the interaction with other energy networks (electricity and gas) and the involvement of end-users (operators and consumers) through ICT-based control and decision making. Finally, to enable significant expansion, cost-effectiveness will be enhanced by transitioning from handicraft to more industrialised solutions that integrate LEAN methodologies to optimise processes and lower costs.
The project has a total budget of 19 M€ and will run for 4 years starting from Jan 2020. It has 21 partners and is led by ACCIONA. Jaume Salom, head of the Thermal Energy and Building Performance group at IREC, will coordinate a WP on the requirements, design and demonstration of heat reuse from data centres to DHC networks.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N°857801.
