Thames Water hopes to harness human ‘poo power’ to heat homes

Thousands of homes in south-west London could soon be warmed by the waste from their local sewage works as part of England’s first poo-powered district heating scheme. Thames Water hopes to harness the heat of human waste from its treatment plant in Kingston upon Thames to warm more than 2,000 new homes that form part of a regeneration plan for the borough’s Cambridge Road estate. Typically, the water company flushes the clean warm water that remains after it has treated its customers’ sewage back into a local river system as effluent. But under the new plan it will funnel the warm water to an energy centre where the effluent will help heat the water destined to warm local homes. The new Thames Water energy centre will use heat pumps to boost the temperature of the water higher, and heat exchangers to transfer the heat of the waste water to a separate system of water pipes which will carry hot water to the district heating scheme . Caroline Kerr, the leader of Kingston council, described the scheme to turn waste into clean energy as a “groundbreaking” step to help make the homes on the Kingston estate some of the greenest […]

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