Challenge

The Province of Antwerp aims to eventually heat its own buildings using only green energy and eliminate all fossil fuels. The project focuses on one site (Zilvermeer in Mol) and detects opportunities for this pilot site to switch from fossil fuels to fully renewable energy sources.

The project aims to provide a solution to a current problem. The current approach to energy saving/sustainability in provincial areas is too fragmented. Numerous measures are being taken, but they are ad hoc and do not fit within a coherent vision.

On the one hand, with this project the Province of Antwerp wants to develop a master plan for an energy transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources in all provincial domains of the province of Antwerp. On the other hand, by means of some concrete pilot projects in the Zilvermeer, they already want to give this vision concrete shape and test it.

Several partial solutions to this challenge already exist, think solar water heaters, shower heat recovery, heat pump boilers, heat from biomass, etc. However, these solutions are mainly used on a small scale for private homes (building-level).  Additional development is needed to make these systems deployable for public buildings (site-level).

Therefore, it is useful to explore in a test setting how they can be deployed on a large domain and investigate what additional opportunities scaling up from building-level to site-level offers. This setting will take into account the characteristics of the neighbourhood, the soil and the nature of the building heritage (old buildings, little or no new construction).