100 MW smart district heating | Espoo, Finland
In Espoo, the second largest city in Finland with over 280,000 inhabitants, Fortum have a roadmap to decarbonize the city’s district heating system during the 2020’s. In order to make it happen, we need different kind of technologies to produce the heat but digital tools also to steer the system optimally. Our answer is artificial intelligence and the smart digital steering system. We are implementing an AI-driven smart steering and end-to-end optimization system for 100MW amount of customer buildings during 2019 in Espoo and we’re aiming to scale it up after that. Our target is to cover up to 80% ordered power in the system level. This may be the largest implementation in the world. The benefits of the system for the customer are: more stable temperature and humidity in the apartment and cost savings by reduced peak power need. For the society the benefit is cleaner heat production and for the operator better profitability through data-optimized production. Over time, established data connectivity also enables better control over ever-increasing complexity of the network. Our system’s operation is based on 1) system level optimization 2) building level optimization and 3) apartment-specific optimization.
