Hot|Cool NO.3/2016 - "Cooperation in the energy sector"

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MEMB E R COMP ANY P RO F I L E BWT A provider of solutions and services within water treatment, BWT Denmark is a 35 year-old company that has been involved in the district heating sector from the very beginning and has supplied systems to all the major combined heat and power plants in Denmark. HOH Technology, as the company was called until 5 years ago, is today owned by BWT, a global company with 3,300 employees and a turnover of EUR 650 million. BWT Denmark is very experienced within district heating. “District heating is something that we, in Denmark, have always been engaged with. This is the reason why when there are projects abroad in need of water treatment, we are the ones within our group to produce and deliver the systems”, explains Thomas Nyman Larsen, Project Director at BWT Denmark.

Besides corrosion protection BWT Denmark can provide systems, depending on the customer’s needs and the required water quality standards, that eliminate limescale in the water or a system that removes residual mineral salts through reverse osmosis, so that there are no ions left in the water. Failing to properly treat and purify the water that runs in the district heating plants causes limescale to build up inside the pipes, which in turn reduces their capacity. The same happens with valves and small heat exchangers. “It is very important that no limescale is present in the water used in district heating. No network is 100% tight, there are always leaks somewhere, therefore there is a constant need to pump water into the network, all depending on how many leaks there are”, says Thomas Larsen.

The necessary amount of water to be pumped into the system points to an interesting fact related to the cost of water consumption. For example, in order to produce a car, a factory needs 450 cubic meters (450,000 L) of water, the equivalent to the consumption of four normal households in Denmark. “Water consumption is something that is costly in many ways for the global community, and therefore everyone is trying to optimize it. Apart from grey- and blackwater, we are able to treat all water, as many places around the world do not have access to groundwater. For these important reasons, in our innovation center we are constantly researching and developing the technology necessary to treat 98.5% of the world’s water capacity”, says Thomas Larsen.

The Danish transmission company VEKS has recently built a large exchanger station in Køge Municipality, located 45km southwest of Copenhagen, and BWT Denmark provided the plant with the necessary equipment for corrosion protection. VEKS supplies heat to many areas, and therefore demineralized and oxygen free water was needed at the local district heating plants. As Thomas Larsen explains: “We have developed a chemical-free technology that eliminates the risk of corrosion in the pipe network. The process involves reducing the level of oxygen in the water to a minimum, by adding hydrogen that runs through a catalyst. To put it in perspective, small combined heat and power plants in Denmark use chemicals to remove the oxygen from the water”.

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