The 47,000-square-meter training space at the Kuortanen Olympic Training Center will soon be heated instead of burning peat instead of geothermal energy.
The department’s cave halls require a lot of energy to warm up for the long winter, when top athletes gather there to practice their skills.
But now the center in Ostrobothnia hopes to reduce about 1,350 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.
It is a contractor, according to Lem-Kem. It is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of a diesel station wagon if it is driven 250 times around the world.
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Director of the Center Jussi Töyrylä says that geothermal investment is part of a plan to make operations carbon neutral by 2030.
The Finnish government has promised to reach “zero” by 2035 and last week announced a plan to stop burning energy peat in the country.
Over the past decade, several changes have increased the center’s energy efficiency. The lighting has been redesigned and solar panels have been installed to meet about 15 percent of the centre’s annual electricity needs.
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"In total, the investment cost a few million, but the cost of a geothermal system, for example, will be reimbursed within 15 years with this financing model," Töyrylä said.
Töyrylä says that the burning of peat will continue on site this spring and summer next to the downtown parking area, but in the autumn the peat-fired heating plant will be closed.
"Geothermal energy saves as much as the average annual emissions of around 750 passenger cars," Töyrylä said.
28 kilometers of pipes
The system works in the same way as in a detached house, although this is one of the largest geothermal projects in Finland.
Even if an ordinary detached house needed only one borehole, Kuortane needs 104 of them, all drilled to a depth of more than 200 meters.
Contractors are scheduled to dig approximately 28 kilometers of underground tunnels for the system.
In addition to the boreholes, the tunnels allow the heating fluid to circulate so that it heats up a few degrees underground. The liquid reaches about 60 degrees with the help of a heat pump.
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According to a Lem-Kem expert Mathias Kampeabout two-thirds of the energy needed is free from land and about one-third is generated by electricity.
In winter, electricity has to be purchased externally, but in summer it comes from about 2,600 solar panels installed in Kuortane last year.
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According to contractors, similar systems could be installed on farms, for example. But technology has its limitations.
"There are exceptions in places where drilling is not possible, for example if you may hit groundwater, or in confined spaces where there is no space to drill," said Kampe.
Boreholes should be drilled at least 15 meters and preferably 20 meters apart.
Automation helps
In addition to heating, lighting is an important energy aspect in large spaces.
Switching to LED lights will save about 760 megawatt hours of electricity per year at the Kuortanen Olympic Center.
Modern energy solutions today receive the help of automation. LED lamps can be programmed automatically according to how the rooms are used.
In heating systems, automation helps to detect faults faster.
If the filters in the heating system are clogged and the system uses more electricity than usual, the problem will be detected immediately. Without an automated system, such faults are only detected during seasonal service.
Automation can also be set to weather conditions in advance to increase heat production even before a cold beak.
Source: The Nordic Page