| Title | Geothermal Energy Use, Country Update for Finland |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kallio, J |
| Year | 2016 |
| Conference | European Geothermal Congress |
| Keywords | Finland, shallow geothermal, geoenergy, EGS |
| Abstract | Finland a huge growth in the amount of HPs started from the year 2005 with less than 100 000 HPs up to today`s 730 000 HPs , of which 130 000 GSHPs (Sulpu 2016). HPs are replacing the earlier popular oil and electric heating systems in small houses and sometimes also district heating. The strongest growth has taken place in air-coupled HPs but also the increase of GSHPs was last year over 9000 units but not reaching anymore the historical top of 14 000 in 2011 (Fig. 1). After that the growth has been slower due to the common decline of economy and building activity. But still today over half of new small houses utilizes GSHP technology and an increasing number of big targets like office buildings, school houses, apartment houses, shopping centres, markets, hospitals take GSHPs for heating and especially cooling of spaces. A clear trend is toward large GSHP installations but still today domestic systems are growing fastest and > 50 % of new small houses takes shallow geothermal (geoenergy) for heating but also for cooling. The largest installation in Finland is in a logistics centre in southern part of Finland, 30 kilometers northward from Helsinki, with 150+150 closed-loop BHEs (two separate buildings ) each 300 m deep (total 90 000 m). This energy field/installation has been provided by an advanced real-time fibre optic monitoring system designed by Geological Survey of Finland GTK and being in function since 2012. The first EGS - pilot project, run by a private company St1Nordic Oy, and aiming to utilize geothermal energy from 6 – 7 kilometer`s depth for district heating with a thermal power of 40 MW, situated in the city of Espoo, was started 2015 with a core sample boring up to 2 km`s depth into the crystalline granitoidic bedrock. This hole was made for research purpose only. The boring of the final production holes is planned to start during springtime 2016, and the first hole be finalized in a half year. It looks today that energypiles for storing and extracting of geoenergy, heat and cold, may have a growing role in future, especially in areas of thick Quartenary clayey sediments. The publication of the first Finnish geothermal energy potential map by GTK (Fig.2) is believed to give an extra jump forward in utilizing GSHPs |