By Jessica Frank-Keyes
Thames Water is exploring how Londoners’ homes could soon be kept warm by heat generated from sewage, City Hall has been told.
Bosses at the water firm said they were exploring the “tremendous potential” to absorb the heat created by the disposal of sewage and turn it into power, London Assembly members heard today.
Sewage within London alone could create 10 terawatt hours of waste water heat, a Thames Water execs said, which is the equivalent of 40 per cent of power generated by Hinkley C.
“The most exciting thing is the potential to generate heat from effluent,” Cathryn Ross, strategy and regulatory affairs director at Thames Water, said. “That’s a tremendous untapped resource and the technology is actually quite simple.
“All you’re doing is using the fact that effluent is relatively warm because of where it comes from – you put a heat inverter around the sewer pipe and you can extract the heat from that.”
Ross said the technology was at a “fairly early stage” but said its Thames Water Ventures company was working on it.
It comes after Centrica signed a deal with Yorkshire Water earlier this year for a 15-year project to extract biomethane from sewage.
Ross also said that floating solar panels could used as an alternative power source, placing them on a number of Thames Water’s London reservoirs.
“We have something like 19 square km of reservoir surface within the M25,” she added. “That’s a tremendous opportunity and we see the potential there to have up to one gigawatt of floating solar generation within the M25.”
