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Mining Urban Heat by aoursler

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Betsy Agar Sep 2, 2017 11:49 Catalyst 1 \| Share via:	Great to see waste heat show up in this contest! I see this proposal is early in its design, and I look forward to more details. This seems like a good opportunity to integrate district energy or combined heat and power (CHP) systems. Also, I recommend building in the first step of improving energy efficiency of buildings, processes, etc. It seems there would be a strong business case for the partners you will be working with to gather data: Fine tune your building operations and processes to save money, then sell the waste heat into a district energy system. You will need to find the balance in cost v. returns, but adding the opportunity to resell waste heat sweetens the value proposition of conserving energy.
Michal Monit Sep 3, 2017 11:50 Catalyst 2 \| Share via:	Dear Anna! A very interesting proposal! It took me a while to delineate the intertwined aspects of your solution outline, but there's definitely great potential there. I recalled now the seemingly fancy heated sidewalks on Iceland, but in fact that's just a smart way to (re)use low-grade heat. There are already a few cities & project which can serve as a great example of mapping heating demand and consumption! - http://qsel.columbia.edu/nycenergy/ (mapping energy consumption of buildings in NYC) - http://news.mit.edu/2015/startup-essess-heat-mapping-cars-0105 (imagine autonomous cars monitoring energy performance of buildings!) - http://web.mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/projects/BostonEnergyModel/index.html (high-res, city-level modeling of energy consumption) The URL you provided for the London study does not work for me, but thanks to that I discovered some other interesting data & initiatives: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/londons-zero-carbon-energy-resource-secondary-heat & https://carto.com/blog/forty-brilliant-open-data-projects/ Thanks!
Itai Mutemeri Sep 4, 2017 02:41 Catalyst 3 \| Share via:	Hi Anna, Great idea! I think it might be useful, from a final proposal point of view, to narrow the scope a bit by focusing primarily on figuring out an innovative way to map the secondary sources. That alone would be massively valuable. The other option would be to focus on creating systems/frameworks to guide planners on how to structure their cities with the reuse of urban heat in mind. Or it could involve helping organisations/institutions make the business case for such an initiative. Just a thought.