Germany-headed waste management and recycling technology provider STRABAG Umwelttechnik GmbH, a subsidiary of engineering and construction services major STRABAG SE, has announced that it has been commissioned by Swedish municipal energy major Göteborg Energi AB to act as a general contractor for the turnkey installation of a 50 MW industrial heat pump system to feed heat into Gothenburg’s district heating network.
The order which results from an EU-wide tender with negotiated procedure represents a major acquisition success story for the “HEAT PUMP ALLIANCE”, an exclusive partnership between STRABAG and Atlas Copco in the industrial and high-performance heat pumps sector agreed in 2022.
The construction works will be carried out by Züblin Scandinavia AB, a Swedish subsidiary of STRABAG with the heat pump system scheduled to begin operations in December 2026. The value of the contract has not been disclosed.
Utilize heat from wastewater
The heat pump will be installed in the existing Rya heating plant in Hisingen near Gothenburg. Built in several stages between 1983 and 1985, the plant has an installed district heating capacity of around 160 MW distributed across four heat pump modules.
The current order involves replacing the two older and smaller Rya VP 1 and Rya VP 2 modules with the new turn key 50 MW industrial heat pump, comprising a turbocompressor from Atlas Copco.
The heat source will be wastewater from the neighbouring wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) with a temperature of at least 10°C even in winter. As a result, every MW of electricity used for the heat pump supplies more than 3.5 MW of district heating at 90°C in the winter.
Low climate impact refrigerant
According to the German Environment Agency, the heat pump has a low climate impact since it uses a natural refrigerant with a global warming potential (GWP) of only 3 and an ozone depletion potential of 0.
With the EU regulation 2024/573 on fluorinated greenhouse gases (GHG) into consideration, the HEAT PUMP ALLIANCE “generally avoids using common synthetic refrigerants such as fully and partially fluorinated hydrocarbons in its heat pumps.”
