Energy Cultures in Brussels and Copenhagen
Reflections on a Research Trip to Copenhagen and Brussels
Shalom Flank, PhD
Summer 2019
Last fall, I accompanied Tommy Wells, director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Energy and the Environment, on a research trip to Brussels and Copenhagen to compare best practices in municipal energy efficiency and district energy initiatives. It was an insightful and rewarding journey where I was able to wear my two hats: the first being my Georgetown hat as lecturer in urban sustainability in the Urban & Regional Planning program; and the second being my business hat under which I practice as a microgrid architect, developing projects and policies for community-scale energy infrastructure in cities across the United States.
Director Wells recruited a city-wide group of thought leaders to join him as a Washington, D.C. delegation. The group included both public and private sectors, starting with his own staff at the District’s Department of the Environment, and public development officials from the DC Department of General Services and the DC Office of Planning. Private sector individuals represented organizations such as DC Water, Pepco and a cross-section of innovative real estate developers, in partnership with the DC Business Industry Association.
This visit culminated several years of knowledge exchange between D.C., Copenhagen and Brussels. With assistance from the Danish and Belgium embassies, Director Wells has created a sister-agency partnership with both cities, which also includes a formal role for the Danish Energy Agency.
Our research in Brussels focused on the PEB 2015 standard for energy efficiency in new buildings, a local version of the Passive House standard. This approach focuses on lowering heating and cooling needs through air-tightness and insulation, with the goal of eliminating the need for active heating and cooling systems in buildings. In 2015, Brussels became the first city in the world to require the Passive House standard for all new building construction, and we wanted to learn the secrets of their success.
Trips like this include poking around the heat pumps, control rooms and energy management dashboards of particularly interesting buildings. Several buildings we visited were too large to be entirely “passive”, though they were most certainly more energy efficient than comparable structures in the United States. One particular standout was the headquarters for the Brussels Environment Agency, the agency responsible for creating the standard, so they had good reason to develop a market-leading case study. I successfully resisted my urge to push the buttons and test drive the mechanical systems!
Cultural differences raised red flags about crossing the Atlantic with these best practices. For example, approved passive building designs in Brussels are permitted to have over 200 hours a year with indoor temperatures above 78 Fahernheit, something that our cultural norms in Washington, D.C. would not accept. Local innovators include a developer who has built a 20-story wooden building using cross-laminated engineered timber. As a building material, wood definitely offers a lower embodied GHG footprint, at least until commercially viable CO2-eating concrete becomes available. But in the United States, our building codes will not permit new wooden buildings of this size.
We saw first-hand the collaborative process that the Ministry has adopted for working hand-in-hand with developers and especially the construction trades, training the workers on the ground (or for multi-story buildings, literally up in the air) who are responsible for successful implementation of air-tight seals and other new-but-not-radical construction techniques. Years of preparation and cooperation went into issuing new building-envelope standards that today would be regarded as impossibly strict in the United States. After laying the proper groundwork, these standards have been smoothly translated into practice in Brussels. Director Wells was so impressed by these training programs, that he is starting a similar program here in D.C.
Local cultural norms in Belgium required us to also taste-test the Belgian chocolate! Our host from the Ministry of Trade, who is currently responsible for exporting urban energy efficiency practices to other countries around the world, formerly had similar responsibilities for chocolate exports. On a first-name basis with staff in the best chocolate shops in town, she helped us to advance Belgium’s local chocolate economy.
As someone who lives and breathes district energy in the United States, Copenhagen is my ideal playground. Thirteen municipalities have joined together to run a single shared heating network supplying over 1 million residents (98% of the regional population) through 1300 kilometers of transmission pipes, supplied by a super-efficient generation network that has reduced CO2 emissions by over 40% in the last dozen years. Despite these strict standards, the population has increased by 20%!
Having this infrastructure as a shared foundation makes the next round of innovations even easier. Our group visited the largest regional produce market (Høje Taastrup Fjernvarme), which requires multiple megawatts of cooling. Even though it was a 40-minute bus ride out of central Copenhagen, they are still on this same thermal network. Amazingly, all of the waste heat from cooling the produce is injected into the network, to be used by other residents and businesses potentially many miles away.
Similarly, we visited a wastewater treatment plant in the middle of town. Unlike similar plants in the United States that also use anaerobic digestion to generate biogas from the bio-solids [just as we do at the Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility operated by DC Water] the Copenhagen plant doesn’t bother with making electricity from the biogas through a co-generation process. Instead, they just burn the biogas directly and inject the heat right into the thermal heating district, without worrying about re-using the energy on-site. The result? Unlike wastewater plants in the United States, the Danish plant is a net energy exporter.
In my own work, I often emphasize the direct relationship between electricity and thermal energy through cogeneration. In Copenhagen, the context is very different, but I still saw this same dynamic of trade-offs between thermal and electric energy. Denmark has copious wind power supplying their energy grid, sometimes more than they know what to do with, and at other times, they have almost none. To respond to this, they have added flexibility to both demand and supply, using less biomass or waste-to-energy when the wind is blowing, storing up that fuel for the doldrums. They also use electricity when it is abundant in the energy grid, to raise the “transmission temperature” of the thermal heating district, and by installing electric-powered heat pumps in new buildings; they are able to balance the carbon intensity of their energy in their grids and networks and thereby consume the cleanest energy on an hour-by-hour basis.
Cultural norms and differences represent unique opportunities in Copenhagen as well. We visited the now famous CopenHill, the new waste-to-energy facility that Bjarke Ingels designed with a ski slope on the roof. Unfortunately, we did not get to go skiing, but we did get to don hard hats to see it under construction, just a few months before it opened to great global fanfare. More astonishing to me than seeing a ski slope on top of a garbage incinerator was seeing huge apartment buildings right across the street from it. How did they ever convince the neighbors that it was okay to build the plant so close to them? Our hosts replied, “We showed them the results of the emissions tests, and once they saw how low the numbers were, they were happy to have the plant across the street.” That level of trust and technocratic dialogue between agencies and urban stakeholders is at least as foreign to us in the United States as trying to pronounce Danish word for incinerator: “forbrændingsanlæg!”
Older parts of the thermal heating network still run on steam and are now being converted to hot water. Having encountered similar problems in the United States, I wanted to better understand the secret of how Copenhagen could afford this large infrastructure investment. My hosts replied, “Oh, it paid for itself – with just a short 25-year payback.” This is a level of resolve not yet attained in our own municipal capital investments. What about building out the energy network at the huge brownfield site we learned about? “It was achieved with pure private investment...and a 1% fixed interest rate provided through public financing,” my hosts added.
The environmental impacts of these projects became our jealousy; we were astounded at how much easier it was to implement these innovations in Copenhagen as compared to Washington. Quasi-public entities administer most of Copenhagen’s infrastructure investments and their operations. The delegation had spirited discussions about how our city’s investor-owned utility and for-profit real estate developers could adapt to the inspiring practices we encountered.
Personally, the trip fueled my quest for a faster, more ambitious transformation of our energy infrastructure. I’d known that technology is not the limiting factor in achieving our most far-reaching goals, but it’s different seeing the reality on the ground, in cities and regions that are otherwise so much like our own. Cultural factors and institutional inertia are important, but they’re not laws of nature, and our own society can adapt given the will to do so. In the classroom at Georgetown, I now feel even more empowered to try and inspire the next generation of urban planners who can help us all achieve that transformation.
Shalom Flank, Ph.D., a 25-year DC resident, became the nation’s first “microgrid architect” 15 years ago. He is a visiting lecturer in urban sustainability in the Georgetown Urban and Regional Planning program. For more on Prof. Flank’s background, see here.