The Life Company and San Polo steelworks announce the start-up of the plant which recovers heat from the furnaces and supplies it to the district heating network.
The thermal recovery avoids the emission of 10,000 tonnes of CO2 in a year and provides heat for 5,000 families: a further step towards decarbonization.
Brescia (21 November, 2023) – Brescia confirms its status as an area of innovation and, thanks to synergy between A2A and Alfa Acciai, strengthens its green vocation. With the beginning of the 2023-2024 heating season, in fact, Brescia’s district heating system took a further step towards decarbonization thanks to the start-up of the new Alfa Heat Recovery plant. The heat supplied to Brescia’s district heating network by the San Polo steelworks increases significantly, meeting the heat requirements of about 5,000 families and doubling the initial forecast for the project. A fine example of virtuous circularity which has important environmental benefits: the recovery of heat from thermal waste avoids the emission into the atmosphere of more than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
The original project, the “Smart Grid Pilot”, which began in 2021, foresaw the feasibility of the recovery of the heat generated by the steelworks’ first furnace (up to that time, dispersed into the atmosphere) to channel it into the city's district heating network by means of the creation of a heat exchange plant and the laying of 1.2 kilometres of dual pipelines between the steelworks and the A2A facility at Lamarmora. That experiment has now become a consolidated industrial process, Alfa Heat Recovery: the recovery of the thermal energy of both of the steelworks’ furnaces with the help of two hot water storage units which make it possible to stabilise and optimise the heat exchange with the district heating network. The collaboration with Alfa Acciai is part of a process initiated by A2A some time ago with the aim of reducing the use of fossil fuels as production sources for the district heating network. Brescia has, in fact, developed an integrated system, the Sistema Ambiente Energia (Environment Energy System), which combines electrical energy production, district heating/cooling and the management of the urban waste cycle, thus eliminating the need to use landfill sites.
Each year, the heat recovery plant produces 70% of the thermal energy distributed by the district heating network (moreover, producing electrical energy corresponding to the requirements of 200,000 families). In recent years, as well as the ending of the use of coal five years ahead of national targets, there has been the addition of industrial heat waste operations (Alfa Acciai, Ori Martin) and storage units (at the Nord and Lamarmora facilities) which have made it possible to further reduce the remaining share of heat produced with gas. Today, Brescia's district heating network serves almost 22,000 users, the equivalent of nearly 180,000 apartments connected: in 2022, the heat supplied to the network amounted to 980 GWh (thermal) and, thanks to the use of non-fossil sources, it was possible to avoid the emission into the atmosphere of 138,525 tonnes of CO2.
The Alfa Acciai Group, whose vision centres on technological innovation and on environmental, social and economic sustainability, has always sought and invested in this synergy, making it possible to recover the heat of the steelworks,
The Alfa Heat Recovery project culminated last summer with the increase in heat recovery by means of the installation of a third heat exchanger, an inverter unit and a third circulation pump. This upgrade further improved the system's performance, increasing the temperature of the water supplied to the network (average 95°C) and optimising the recovery of all the heat available. Alfa Heat Recovery now makes it possible to generate clean heat amounting to about 50,000 MWh a year, meeting the requirements of about 5,000 families. The area of the city served thanks to the recovery of heat generated by the steelworks includes the San Polo and Sanpolino districts, with over 2,700 users (each user may include more than one home; the user, may, for example, be an entire apartment building): the heat provided by Alfa Acciai meets 73% of the average requirement of this urban area.
“Alfa Heat Recovery, a project developed in synergy with the Alfa Acciai Group, confirms A2A’s commitment to the decarbonization of our towns and cities and the reuse of the energy available in the areas that we serve – states Renato Mazzoncini, A2A Group managing director. Heat recovery is, in fact, one of the mainstays of the sustainable development that A2A is pursuing in all of its operations. For our district heating networks, we are striving to make increasing use of the heat dispersed by industrial facilities like steelworks, but also by data centres, to heat and supply hot water to our communities without producing any further CO2. What is more, today, cities generate around 75% of the planet’s emissions of carbon dioxide and much of this is due to the heating of our homes. To meet the 2050 decarbonization targets, it is therefore essential to do something about our buildings. Investing only in new doors, windows and cladding may not be enough, as well as being a long and costly process. It is also necessary to decarbonize thermal energy at source. And Brescia confirms itself as a laboratory-city: 50 years ago, it gave Italy its first district retaining network and stopped the smoke rising from 20,000 chimneys. Today, thanks to a network increasingly fuelled by non-fossil sources, Brescia has another extraordinary tool with which to fulfil its quest for total decarbonization.”
“Alfa Heat Recovery is a perfect example of how companies of the Alfa Acciai Group interpret sustainability and put it into practise – explains Margherita Stabiumi, Alfa Acciai board member. The project has been developed thanks to synergy with an industry leader like A2A and to the effective dialogue with local institutions, making it possible to combine sustainability, circularity and symbiosis between businesses and communities, and achieving concrete results in terms of the decarbonization of our urban areas. The system of the recovery and sale of heat also projects our Group’s model of circularity to the historically consolidated sphere on which the electro-siderurgic model is based – the production of steel from scrap metal recycling – to go forward and project it towards a model of super-circularity by which it is possible to recover energy, too, harnessing the heat which would otherwise be dispersed into the atmosphere.”
"The partnership between A2A and Alfa Acciai bears witness to the capacity for innovation that has always characterised our city and our businesses – claims Brescia’s mayor, Laura Castelletti. Following on from our year as Italy's City of Culture, we face a great new challenge, that of making Brescia a European Green Capital. We know that it will not be easy. However ambitious and challenging this may be, it is an achievable objective. We want to show that we have the ideas, the plans and the experience needed to create a sustainable city, a city well aware of the importance of the future of the ecosystem and the quality of life of all those who live here. To achieve this, however, we need the contribution of everyone, including our businesses. And this is why it is important to support virtuous initiatives like Alfa Heat Recovery, another block in the building of a decarbonised district heating system."
Contacts:
ALFA ACCIAI
Siderhub press office
Federico Fusca - 327 7477 962
Davide Del Bono - 339 5461890
press@siderhub.com
A2A
Giuseppe Mariano, Head of Media Relations, Social Networking and Web
Silvia Merlo – Davide Bacca, Press Office
ufficiostampa@a2a.eu
davide.bacca@a2a.it
Tel. [+39] 3491860404