Project details

• Location: Campus Lichtwiese, TU Darmstadt
• Energy infrastructure:
  • Local heating grid of Campus Lichtwiese.
  • A total of 155,000 m² of heated floor area on campus are supplied with 22.6 GWh/a of heat and 8 GWh/a of cooling.
  • The grid is supplied by a central cogeneration heat and power plant on Campus Lichtwiese and is connected to a public district heating grid. The central plant provides heat and electricity to the university with three CHP units with a thermal power of 2 MW each and an additional one with a power of 3 MW. The units are operated to meet the campus’ power demand and the residual thermal demand is satisfied by six gas peak boilers with 9.3 MW each. In contrast to the heating grid, which supplies the whole university, the cooling grid only supplies campus Lichtwiese by an absorption chiller of 1 MW, cooling.
• BTES heat sources:
  • Cogeneration heat and power plant.
  • Supercomputer waste heat.
  • Solar panels from 2025 onwards.
• Objectives of the demo site:
  • Store heat surplus in summer and excess heat from the district heating backloop grid, from the supercomputer and from solar panels installed in the campus.
  • Reduce CO₂ emissions and heating costs and optimise renewable heat on the campus.
  • Achieve storage capacity of 270 kW e.g., 20 TJ per year.
• Status:
  • Three boreholes, and three monitoring wells were drilled in 2022 with success, with associated geophysical logging (data available upon request)
  • e-GRT and completion finalised by the end of the summer 2023.
  • A geophysical dataset including cross-hole measurements seismic tomography (an imaging technique to gain geological information of the subsurface between the boreholes) was performed between October 2022 and March 2023 (see pictures below).
  • Beginning of the test phase around the three wells is planned for a duration of 1.5 year from summer 2023, with load and unload of the three boreholes.
  • Connection to the district heating grid foreseen for 2025.