Air Quality Improvement in the Greater Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Region—Shandong Clean Heating and Cooling Project The proposed project will implement three clean heating and cooling subprojects to accelerate air pollution abatement in Shandong Province. The heating and cooling projects proposed are innovative, as they will combine renewable energy technologies and waste heat recovered from industry and power plants to reduce the energy and carbon intensity of heat production and refrigeration, and thereby reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the heat island effect in urban areas. An overview of each subproject is provided below.
Subproject 1: West Jinan Waste Heat Utilization and Clean Energy Subproject.This subproject will provide heat to urban residents, industrial, and business customers. The technologies to be used on the project include: (i) Large temperature difference waste heat exchange technology is adopted for transporting waste heat from the nearby power plants to the city, which will increase the heat transport capacity by more than 50% than using the standard technology, and same time reduce electricity consumption for cycling pumps. The large temperature difference is achieved by lowering the temperature of return water to the primary pipeline. The waste heat will be used to supply heating to about 80 million m2 of buildings; (ii) Year-round heat supply needs to be provided to an industrial park with industrial and business customers located in west Jinan. A biomass-based combined heating and power plant using biomass briquette made of agriculture waste will supply heating to 1.54 million m2 buildings and will generate electricity of 133 GWh per year. A feedstock assessment showed that only 12% of the available agriculture waste will be consumed by the biomass plant; (iii) Jinan is endowed with geothermal resources. Deep-well geothermal offers an environmentally friendly alternative to the current practice of using coal-based space heating. Deep-well reinjection technology will be used to extract and exchange heat from the underground water, which will then be filtered and recharged back to the same aquifer; and (iv) For a few newly built resident communities not covered by the heating network and where geothermal resource is not available, distributed gas-fired boilers will be used. This subproject enables Jinan to fully utilize waste heat in the neighboring regions, to form a waste heat-dominated heating system, with distributed energy supply from biomass, geothermal and natural gas as supplementary.
Subproject 2: Shanghe Coal-Free Clean Heating Demonstration Subproject. This subproject covers the urban area of Shanghe County, the semi-urban area of 11 towns and 80,000 rural households where coal-fired stoves or coal-fired boilers are common for space heating. The subproject will use geothermal energy as the main heat source to replace coal-fired heating. Other clean options, such as air-source heat pump, are selected as distributed heating source where the pipeline network is not available. Gas-fired boilers will be an auxiliary heat source. This subproject also plans to retrofit total 660,400 m2 of urban buildings and 30,000 rural households to improve their energy efficiency. Based on the available resources, heavily polluting coal-fired stoves in 80,000 rural households will be replaced by air-to-air heat pumps, air-to-water heat pumps, heat-storage radiators, carbon crystal plate radiators and small household gas heaters. This subproject will play an important role in, and have demonstration effect to, other counties in the northern PRC who are also facing similar air quality issues caused by the winter heating.
Subproject 3: East Jinan Low-Emission Combined District Heating and Cooling Subproject. East Jinan is where the central business district located. The large amount of heating and cooling demands in this area requires a low-emission system supplying both heat and cooling. For heating supply, two options will be used: (i) Industrial waste heat through long-distance pipeline will be used to supply heat to 6.2 million m2 buildings; and (ii) Electrode boilers with heat storage will use off-peak electricity at night, and then deliver hot water to the households in the day time to heat up to 700,000 m2 area. For district cooling, two technologies will be adopted: (i) Ice storage, which uses off-peak electricity during the night and stores the cooling energy in the form of ice. During peak hours in the daytime, ice is melted to provide cooling; and (ii) When the cooling demand is large enough, lithium bromide absorption chiller driven by the waste heat from the power plant will be used to deliver cold water to the consumers through long-distance pipelines. The subproject aims to expand the area of waste heat supply, and at the same time use off-peak electricity to produce and store heating and cooling capacity to improve the waste heat utilization and shift peak load.