Smart Heat Supply in Austria within the PITAGORAS Project

The European funded cooperative research and demonstration project PITAGORAS is focused on efficient integration of city districts with industrial parks through smart thermal grids. The overall objective of the project is to demonstrate a highly replicable, cost-effective and greatly energy efficient large-scale energy generation system for sustainable urban planning of low energy city districts. As part of the project two demonstration plants namely in Brescia, Italy and Kremsmünster, Austria are being designed and will be built and tested during the project. The demonstration plant in Austria focuses on installing a large-scale solar thermal system of 10,000 m2; including seasonal storages with a total capacity of 60,000 m3 in order to supply the local district with heat and to reduce the gas consumption of a large combined heat and power (CHP) plant nearby. Additionally, to the demonstration plant in Austria the collector efficiency of several different collector types of different collector manufacturers is being tested under real outside conditions, which may give valuable insights on these collectors in order to choose the most efficient collector for the demonstration plant and ultimately on the future development of solar collectors.