Sheffield’s energy challenge: Could waste heat be powering the city in the future?

From your laptop to the local sewage works heat is being generated and simply being lost up into the air. If Sheffield, with its ambition to be carbon neutral by 2030, could somehow harness and recycle that energy it could keep the city’s homes, businesses and shops toasty warm for free.

That maybe a slightly simplistic view, but for the likes of Natalie Robinson, E.ON’s Head of City Energy Partnerships it’s exactly this kind of challenge that she works with every day.

She has worked for E.On for 26 years in various roles across the business – residential, industrial, commercial, energy supply and solutions and more, looking at energy problems and solutions for the most vulnerable houses and households to looking ahead to future energy solutions like solar and battery storage.

Her role means working with cities, like Sheffield, to advise and help find solutions for their specific challenges.

“We look at how can we bring our capability and experience to the public sector,” she said. “We work collaboratively and share the ambition for change.”

Sheffield’s challenges for its zero-carbon ambition are well-documented and include issues with housing stock, fuel poverty and cold homes (impacting health and wellbeing) as well as increases in energy prices, air quality issues and transport. Energy, how we use it and the effects of its bi-products impact many areas of our lives, and E.ONs approach recognises this.

“We don’t just work with councils, but we are collaborating with businesses, residents, community groups, universities, hospitals, national government and more, bringing it all together,” said Natalie.

E.ON’s work, and this relatively new role, provides an opportunity to bring public and private sectors together to work cohesively towards a joint ambition.

In Sheffield this has led to schemes like the Blackburn Meadows power plant and the current expansion of the heat exchange network.

Powering Sheffield

E.ON is adding around 10km to the existing 8km heat network to connect businesses and homes across the Lower Don Valley region, delivering more low carbon and cost-effective heating to the city.

The 10-year project is costing hundreds of millions of pounds and will provide work for 2,000 people in Sheffield.

Sheffield City Council (SCC) is one of 28 cities in the UK that are taking part in the UK Government-led Heat Network Zone Pilot Programme (HNZPP). In addition, SCC is part of the Advanced Zoning Pilot (AZP), which aims to support the construction of a number of city-wide heat networks starting at the end of 2025 – including this one, powered by the Blackburn Meadows power plant which creates heat from renewable sources.

You can read more about it here

Planning for the future

But it’s not just about jobs for the here and now. Natalie explains that, as technology changes and our energy needs and supplies change, we will need different skills.

“That’s the beauty of having these long-term partnerships with cities. We can plan how we do this and what is needed. Electricity consumption will double in the next 20 years.”

This means technology will change, and so working with local businesses and colleges now will ensure local people can be equipped with those skills as this transformation takes place. E.ON itself runs a number of apprenticeship schemes too.

E.ON also takes an active role in helping people work collaboratively in its schemes. For example, putting in these new pipes in Sheffield will be disruptive. So, whilst the work is done they will work with others to see if any other improvement works can be done at the same time – better streetlighting perhaps, a cycle path, three planting, green spaces etc.

And they are looking at how that waste heat produced in the city could be harnessed and recycled.

“It’s not just industrial processes that generate waste heat,” Natalie explained. “Think about call centres for example, and all the heat from computers and laptops.

“What we are bringing to the table is that experience. We are used to delivering large scale projects and we are set up to handle these larger projects and we have the skills and the supply chain. We can work to ensure that waste heat goes back into Sheffield itself.”

No source of heat is off the table – E.ON is working with Trent Water to look at how they might capture the heat from sewage systems!

Natalie explained the work done with cities like Sheffield can be shared.

“Energy is a national issue. What we learn with these city partnerships can become a blueprint for other cities. We need to take these learnings into how we evolve in the future.”