Renewable district heating has become a hot topic in Serbia. The conference Renewable Energy Sources in District Heating and Cooling, held at the same time as the 50th International HVAC&R Congress and Exhibition in early December in Belgrade, attracted more than 400 attendees.
“The great interest shown by experts and the media during the December conference helped us a lot in forging new relationships with high-level representatives for municipalities, local governments and public utility companies to raise the profile of SDH,” said Bojan Bogdanovic, who launched the event. He is also Principal Fund Manager of Renewable District Energy in the Western Balkans (ReDEWeB), a programme supported by Austria and implemented by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
ReDEWeB has already supported several prefeasibility and feasibility studies on solar district heating in Serbia and Kosovo. The most advanced project in terms of planning is the one in the Serbian town of Pancevo, where the two-year test of a 906 m² solar field put up in January 2017 has convinced the local council of the benefits of solar heat. Together with the Kotež power plant, the field supplies hot water to about 2,200 citizens. The council then commissioned the installation of 198 large collectors, mounted onto the roof of the Kotež plant, to meet an even higher share of the hot water needs in the district heating network with solar energy. The council members are now looking into adding an SDH system with seasonal storage. A prefeasibility study prepared by the Austrian engineering firm Solid mentions a 35,000 m² field of collectors, 150,000 m³ of storage volume and a 15 MW absorption heat pump.
All presentations from the 50th International HVAC&R Congress have been posted online and are available for download here.
Source and full article: solarthermalworld.org
Picture: Milica Knežević for SMEITS©2019