This is the latest edition of the Reinventing Scotland newsletter. To receive it for free every Tuesday, sign upA KEY theme of my articles on the transition to a wellbeing economic approach is that many of the policies Scotland needs have been successfully implemented elsewhere. We know they work and although they may seem radical in the UK, they are often standard practice abroad. One such example is"district heating". Let’s look at Denmark as an example.
The energy used to run this system is generated in combined heat and power plants . Cogen plants take rubbish and burn it to produce energy. It's not exactly clean energy, but Copenhagen’s cogen plant captures 12 tonnes of CO2 a day and district heating from waste has considerably lower CO2 emissions than the gas it would replace. In Scotland, we will be able to run district heating systems on wind and tidal energy in the future.
CopenHill produces power for use in buildings and heat which is directed into the district heating system to heat buildings and provide hot water. It burns some 550,000 tonnes of waste per year. Sometimes, it has to import waste from other countries, including 15-20,000 tonnes of waste from the UK which would be burnt less efficiently or sent to British landfill sites.New York still uses an older iteration of district heating, with around 105 miles of pipes servicing 1500 buildings in Manhattan.