Determining the UK’s potential for heat recovery from wastewater using steady state and dynamic modelling - preliminary results

By 2050, UK plans to create ‘low carbon society’. To meet this ambitious target, UK’s heating sector must be completely decarbonized. The identification and deployment of low carbon heating sources is thus an urgent policy and research priority. Recovering heat from sewage wastewater is relatively new and attractive option as it can help UK move towards its climate change targets while decarbonising the heating sector & reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. In the domestic context, wastewater is normally discharged at higher temperature than ambient (a carrier of heat/ thermal energy) losses its energy to (ground) environment before it reaches to WWTP. Recovering this heat from wastewater could be a considerable source of energy, revenue and is environmental friendly as it results in the reduction of GHG emissions, resource conservation and in increase share of renewable energy. In last decade, many cities around the world have successfully implemented wastewater thermal energy recovery but UK is lagging behind. Pilot project such as in Scotland is leading the way, but further research is needed to build the evidence base and replicate the concept elsewhere in UK. The Home Energy 4 Tomorrow (HE4T) project at London South Bank University (LSBU) was created to address this evidence gap. The project objectives include sizing the heat potential recoverable from wastewater at designated sites. The current paper forms part of the HE4T project and the second in series of output on wastewater heat recovery in UK. In this paper we present some initially measured data, variations in wastewater temperature and flow, steady state and dynamic model results wastewater temperature and the potential heat recovery of the designated site. Early results, their limitations and possible routes to address these limitations are discussed along with policy implications for UK heat strategy.