Is The Future Of Energy In Windham, NY District Heating And Solar ?

A possible Future If We Demand It!

There is no doubt that the future of Windham, NY is changing. There is no doubt about that fact. However, there are plenty of ways we as a town can address certain core issues that are facing all towns across the nations– such as the rising costs of utilities.  The question of the future is how can we as a town start to create solutions that benefit our communities and our citizens in ways that are both sustainable and ecologically sound. District Heating And Cooling is the answer to this question.   A District Heating And Cooling  project should be seen as a means to generate long term local careers that stabilize community growth and develop our communities long term viability and energy usage. 

District Heating and Cooling:

District Heating and Cooling is simply a centralized method of heating and cooling a series of buildings or even a city such as in Sweden in Stockholm. District Heating functions on the process of generating pressurized steam in a centralized location rather than individual locations then distributing this heat to buildings in a community.  Currently Sweden is leading the world in District Heating and Cooling has systems that are 70 km (43. 496 miles) in length the projects can be extended to more than 100 km (62 miles) in length. In the summer this process  allows the return of heated water via heat exchangers in Homes and commercial buildings to the stock of already heated water. Thus cooling your homes and offices without centralized air conditioning. 

In our case the best route to making this a possibility is the use of solar steam generation. Solar Steam generation was first developed in France in 1866 by Augustin Mouchot (1825-1912) and by 1878 his concentrated solar steam generator at the Universal Exhibit in Paris that year. It won a gold medal. However, due to the decreasing costs of coal it was not seen as viable. However, since those earlier years of the technology the storage of steam has greatly increased and our abilities to store thermal energy has expanded sufficiently since the 19th century to make this a possibility for our community.  

What I’m envisioning is a scalable system designed to increase as our town’s needs increase. I would start with a few acres of Concentrated Solar Panels the most efficient are the parabolic trough type.  They offer the most economical and efficient means to achieve our goals.  A solar project in Sweden, the   Högslätten 2023 Solar Thermal Park uses 3,000 sq meters of collectors to generate 1.5MW of heating power. We could expand this system to about 24,000 sq meters or 8 times the capacity roughly and we would need about 8 times the space so about 12 acres.  For 12 MW of power generation or enough to heat roughly 400 homes ( Almost 71% of all permanent homes in Windham, NY)  with a 3,000 sq ft floor plan[These are Napkin Type calculations designed to only illustrate the feasibility of the idea].  We can construct this system with a redundant biomass boiler system to even out the demand on the system over the year as well.  These biomass boilers  could also be used as a Cogeneration plant to power municipal buildings and the local school in a completely isolated and secure electrical grid. Cogeneration plants like this increase the productivity of District Heating by a measurable amount. 

In the summer this system would pump chilled water into the homes thus extracting heating through a heat exchanger– this heated water would then pass through another heat exchanger in the District Heating Plant where it would add it to the stored heated water that could be used for summertime water demand thus reducing the demand on the concentrated solar systems and the biomass boiling systems keeping the system at a constant temperature– perhaps, say 100 degrees F.  It takes a lot less energy to raise a water that is already at 100 degrees F to 200 degrees F going from   50-70 degrees F will require to achieve the same operating temperatures.  

Storage is critical for this system to operate properly–  I think our best solution is going to be  Pit Thermal Energy Story Systems Or PTES.  These systems can be best understood as a form of artificial Pond that is usually between 16ft - 50ft deep storing heated water between 70-95C (or about 153 F to 203F)for periods ranging from days to months at a time. 

The stored water is then fed through a series exchangers to warm the district heating system’s water supply without the use of fossil fuels. This will reduce our reliance on using our Biomass boilers.  And will allow us to store captured lost heat from other local resources such as our water-treatment plant and home’s A/C conditioning systems. All of which at this moment in time is wasted in unproductive endeavors such as being vented into the open atmosphere. In fact we should  understand that this system will encourage us to find new and inventive ways of capturing what would otherwise be lost energy to always improve our efficiency. 

Data Centers and Distributed-Computing that are both energy intensive in electricity and wasteful in water could be done on a small scale and actually be seen as a benefit of our district heating and cooling models. For example we could construct a small data center/distributed-computing center for our town’s future technological needs. These centers require massive amounts of energy to cool their many computer servers. In our District heating model, what is a wasteful and environmentally unfriendly business model of exploiting large bodies of water and leaving the waste heat in these bodies of water could be put to use in our district heating model safely providing heat for homes and other businesses in the town.  Using power generated in our CHP operation will not only reduce costs to our Municipality but also give our community a leg up in the future of microgrids that provide greater resilience to power outages and are more adaptable to green technologies. 

The same can be said for other potential larger cooperative developments the town should look into. From the Glass Making Cooperative I see in our future and the Sunflower Oil Cooperative and other Agricultural cooperatives to future tech cooperatives– I see a future of Windham that is based on Cooperative Solutions to large scale problems.  A future that sees our development as a cohesive whole that leaves no one out.   This is how Windham Can Grow!