NEUTRON - Pilot Energy Project

The NEUTRON pilot will develop and showcase the methodology to support the transition via the definition of existing innovative technologies, such as the Green Heat Module (GHM). It will implement this methodology in sectoral pilots, including energy production from renewable energy and energy-from-waste (EfW), Digital Twins, and Building Information Modelling, to accelerate a just transition. There is a consensus on the potential to exploit flexibility from District Heating in combination with renewable energy production, the quantification of this potential is challenging due to the diversity of DHs and energy markets across countries.

As the main emission domains are the electricity and heat sectors, it is of the highest importance to address these emission domains. Some of the challenges identified are the volatile generation of local renewable energy and the uncertainty of heat supply due to the shutodwn of lignite power plants and the unknown future prices of a replacement with antural gas due to the war against Ukraine.

On top of it, the city also faces cold weather in winter, with old building stock. Some of the challenges identified are the following:

More than 50% of buildings without insulation envelope
Subsidies for competing fuels
Difficulty of fuel price risk assessment
Investment in renewables that is not cost-efficient
Transaction costs
In the waste/wastewater management sector: possibility of downcycling where recycling of waste can be done into products of inferior quality and reduced functionality.

Kozani's pathway to Climate Neutrality

Climate change is a serious concern that has profound implications for all humans in global, national, and local level. The climate crisis remains the defining challenge of our time.

Greece produced over 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2022, Half or these emissions are produced in the region of Western Macedonia. Kozani’s CO2 emissions are approximately 400,000 tons, and zero is what we need to aim for. This sounds difficult because it will be. Kozani has never done anything quite this big.

The Municipality of Kozani, which is the largest municipality in the Region of Western Macedonia, a region among those in the EU where lignite extraction and the generation of electricity from lignite-fired power plants is the most significant economic activity, has faced adverse effects and is expected to be further affected heavily by the clean energy transition.

Accelerating the twin green and digital transition will be key to building a lasting and more resilient growth, in line with the EU’s new growth strategy, the European Green Deal.

The 2019 Governmental decision to decarbonise Greek economy and energy, results into the decommissioning of almost all power plants by 2025. Even though the National Energy and Climate Plan is a first step to the energy transition, for the Municipality of Kozani its consequences are imminent and more severe, spanning even further to implications on employment (among the highest in the EU) and income of the local economy, which added to the repercussions of a decade – long national economic recession. Furthermore, Kozani’s district heating system is based on the heat provided by the lignite thermal power plants, the decommissioning of which is leading to a gap in heat generation capacity for residential use.

In this framework, Kozani, since the summer of 2021, undertook a leading role in the energy transition in the region: Kozani aims to be climate-neutral by 2030 – a city with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. This objective is at the heart of the European Green Deal and in line with the EU and Hellenic Republic’s commitments to global climate action under the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

After the Commission’s announcement on European Missions and the launch of the Mission on ‘100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030’ in September 2021, the City of Kozani made an audacious leap further to become climate neutral by 2030.

In 2022 Kozani welcomed the NZC’s announcement to include Kozani in the European Mission of 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030, delivering the EU’s climate target on the way to climate neutrality.

In February 2023 Kozani was among the first cohort of Pilot Cities (2022) embarking its two-year journey towards climate neutrality within the Pilot Cities Programme, aiming to test and implement an innovative approach to address emissions originated from stationary energy, and especially from the building sector.

The main objective of NEUTRON is to develop climate neutrality transition pathways for the building sector, targeting electricity, heating and cooling, and involving all actors representing the quadruple helix.

Green Heat Module as a future-proof modernization solution for the decarbonization of District Heating

Since the municipality of Kozani is committed to having a 100% CO2 emissions reduction from 2010 until 2030, the full-scale implementation of the concept elaborated during the pilot project aims to extinguish these 81% CO2 emissions.

Under the NEUTRON pilot, the participating partners develop and showcase the methodology to support the transition via the definition of existing innovative technologies, such as the Green Heat Module (GHM): green electricity is converted into high-temperature heat up to 1,000 °C in high-performance electric heaters, thermally stored in the high-temperature storage tank and used to supply heat to the city on demand. Due to the high storage temperature, a combined heat and power plant is run from the stored energy, providing valuable electricity output on demand in addition to the heat supply of the district heating.

The maximum power output from the Green Heat Module would be around 80 MW thermal peak power to the district heating system; the input to the Green Heat Module comes from renewable electricity installations, where production peaks that cannot be fed into the electricity grid due to grid congestion. The GHM enables the utilization of volatile renewable electricity production by storing energy and providing it as combined heat and power output on demand. Taking the electricity output potential into consideration in addition to the heat supply, this would translate into roughly 322,000 tons of CO2 reduction annually.

The economic and technical assessment of the pilot activity is planned in two phases, an initial demonstration phase and a followup full-scale implementation to cover the full demand of the DH installation, while the initial phase of the activity (the demonstrator for the technology) is calculated to reduce around 2,000 tons of CO2 annually.

Additionally, the technical concept is planned to take advantage of the organic (and not only) waste, having a circular management mindset under the scope of sustainable development. The outcome of this activity is to finally treat the waste as biomass, thus producing biogas used as an input at the GHM system for heat and power generation, supplementing the renewable energy storage during times of low RES production. The potential biogas production from the available sludge and organic waste, thus the potential CO2 emissions reduction is an activity planned to take place with the funding of the NZC program. The methane produced from the waste is not calculated at the city’s final annual emission calculation. This means that, not only would the biogas replace the natural gas and oil as a source in the energy mix, but it would also stop acting as a GHG emission.