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NETWORK / 13 / FEBRUARY 2017 One of the difficulties in looking to the Dan- ish model of DH for adoption is the level of integration the technology has in city cen- tres, which would be virtually impossible to achieve retrospectively in cities like London. A better model is district cooling, which is a comparatively new industry in Denmark. HOFOR, one of Denmark's largest utility companies, branched into district cooling in 2008. Before, cooling was an activity primar- ily undertaken by private companies. District cooling is subject to much the same plan- ning, design and organisation as DH. The company is growing rapidly, with 60 delivery agreements in place to date, representing 52MW of contracted capac- ity. HOFOR's model of expansion involves securing customer capacity up front before committing to building an extension of the system – ensuring that expansion will be profitable. So far the cooling system has required an investment totalling around £60 million, but securing the capacity in advance means in 2015 HOFOR made a profit of around £1.2 million on a turnover of £4 million. Although it has already made a healthy profit, HOFOR says the purpose of its opera- tions is to lower CO2 emissions. To this end it is owned by a municipality that decides how the profit will be spent. So how does HOFOR achieve what DH developers in GB have struggled to do and secure capacity before development starts? While being cheaper, and helping reduce CO2 emissions, the main benefit to custom- ers is space saving. The removal of each customer's individual compressor and condenser for replacement with a single exchanger frees up valuable building space. The system works by using seawater at a temperature between 0 to 20°C to cool a closed system of water that is pumped through the pipes to customers, where the cold is exchanged into their own air condi- tioning systems. While seawater is capable of meeting the entire cooling capacity in the winter, in the summer when the temperature of the seawater is higher, HOFOR calls upon gen- erators and absorbers to meet demand. The system is capable of acting as energy stor- age by utilising cheap electricity at night to cool the water which is stored in the pipes ready for use during the day. Although there is a high demand for heat, HOFOR says there is also a healthy capacity for cooling. It estimates that there could be as much as 200MWh of cooling potential in Copenhagen – to meet air con- ditioning, server cooling and process cool- ing requirements. The global demand for cooling is expected to increase and must not be over- looked in any conversation on heat. N If anything represents the Danish green agenda it is the Amager Resource Centre. When the building had to be refurbished, a decision was made to transform the waste-to-energy plant into the top attrac- tion in the city. While continuing its primary purpose as a waste-to-energy plant, the new design transforms the roof of the plant into a year-round artificial ski slope. Consisting of three pistes and a mountain forest area, the activity centre is expected to take centre stage in an industrial area which is quickly becoming a hub for extreme sports. The building's designer says the build- ing "redefines the relationship between the waste plant and the city. It will be both iconic and integrated, a destination in itself, and a reflection on the progressive vision of the company." More than that, it reveals how important social-economic factors are to the Danish way of life, tak- ing precedent over cheaper prices or po- tentially better views. Although still being built, the Danes have already taken the building to their hearts and it is one of the major tourist attractions on the popular canal boat tours that visitors flock to. Indeed, the building will draw attention to its carbon footprint by puffing smoke rings out of its smoke stack at regular intervals. Each smoke ring will represent a ton of fos- sil CO2 and is intended to improve the awareness and understanding of how much a ton of CO2 actually is. Visitors to the ski slope will also be able to glimpse the inner workings of the building while on the way up to the top of the building in the elevator. At night a laser will be used to project a piechart onto the smoke ring to represent the proportion of fossil CO2 currently in the Danish energy system. U S E C A S E A m A g E r r E S o U r C E C E n t r E , C o p E n h A g E n tECh Fo CUS – DIStrICt C o oLIng