Thursday, February 27, 2020

Finland: Opportunity for Geothermal to Provide Sustainable City Heating Solutions for Helsinki

Helsinki Energy Challenge (City of Helsinki)

Helsinki searches sustainable city heating solutions: Global one million euro challenge competition launches today

In a drastic turn to eliminate coal as the main source of district heating, The City of Helsinki today kicks off the Helsinki Energy Challenge – a global one million euro (about USD 1,100,000) competition to find the future of urban heating. With the aim to find a solution sustainable in the long term, ideas presented must not rely on fossil fuel or biomass fired heating.

The goal of the challenge is to find solutions that can be implemented in Helsinki by 2029 and that potentially could contribute to decarbonising city heating around the world. The City of Helsinki is committed to openly sharing the solutions and knowhow gathered from the challenge. Cities such as Toronto, Amsterdam, Vancouver, and Leeds as well as organisations like the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council and C40 City Solutions Platform, are already supporting the initiative, to name a few.

With the aim of becoming carbon-neutral by 2035 and with coal banned from energy production in Finland from 2029, Helsinki is strongly dedicated to the decarbonisation of cities. Several cities already have ambitious plans to reduce carbon emissions. The City of Helsinki takes things one step further in declaring that it will not rely on biomass-fired heating, making the city’s energy production not just fossil free, but truly sustainable.

The Helsinki Energy Challenge is a challenge competition, open globally to anyone who can propose a sustainable heating solution for Helsinki – consortiums, start-ups, larger and more established companies, research institutions, universities, research groups and individual experts. The only requirement is that participants should join the competition as a team.

The challenge is open for submissions from February 27, 2020 until May 31, 2020. By early July, finalists will be invited to a co-creation phase, which includes a 3-day boot camp, where they are provided support to develop their proposals, before presenting them to an international jury of experts who will name the winner(s). The winning solution(s) will be presented in November and awarded with one million euros.

More Information.........

From the Global Geothermal News archives: