With these pipes, the Toulouse University Hospital will be able to heat itself thanks to your garbage cans
By Thibaut Calatayud
Published on
For six months of the year, the CHU will now be heated… thanks to your bins! Thursday, October 13, 2022, Toulouse Metropolis a responsible for the installation which is based on the Purpan hospital heating network to that powered by the Mirail incineratorwhere approximately 290,000 tons of household waste are burned each year.
Nothing is lost, everything is transformed… even the heat!
This connection was put into service last August, right in the heart of the energy of the university hospital centre.
It is thanks to this division, which serves 350,000 m² at the Purpan hospital, that the Toulouse University Hospital provides “heat, cold, continuity of operation of medical activities and our hotel conditions for our professionals and our patients. “, enumerates Jean-François Lefebvre, director general of the Toulouse hospital.
The Mirail heating network avoids the emission of 46,000 tonnes of CO2 per year
The Mirail heating network, created in the 1960s, is adapted to the Mirail incinerator. It is 99% powered by energy recovered from the burning of household waste.
Since its creation, many extensions have been carried out towards the Cancéropôle, the districts of Bordelongue, Papus, La Faourette, Bagatelle or even the cartoucherie eco-district.
Today, the network is 44 kilometers long of buried pipes serving the equivalent of 22,000 homes. 180 GWh per year of energy are supplied to subscribers. Emissions of 46,000 tons of CO2 are eliminated each year by the network, which is the equivalent of the emissions of 38,000 cars.
Until now, the CHU only used a system of biomass boiler room. The two high-performance wood-fired boilers meet more than 90% of heat requirements and allow annual reduction of 5,300 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
From now on, thanks to this connection of the Purpan and Mirail heating networks, the hospital will also be able to heat itself using the heat produced by the waste burned in the Mirail incinerator. All this for six months (from 1uh May to October 31). “Previously, this heat went into the atmosphere,” explains Valérie Patron, regional director of Dalkia in the South-West region.
“With this new heating network, our CHU is taking another step towards the ecological exemplarity that we want for our buildings and our means of transport”, rejoices Jean-Luc Moudenc, mayor (LR) of Toulouse and president of the metropolis.
An installation at 3.5 million euros
To make this connection, Enerience, a subsidiary of Coriance, laid 1.6 km of pipes to connect the Purpan University Hospital heating network to that located in the Cartoucherie district.
Transaction amount? 3.5 million euros. Nearly 1,350,000 euros financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Occitanie Region to the tune of 273,000 euros.
What future for the Mirail incinerator?
A major consultation is underway, until November 27, to determine what will happen to the future of the Mirail incineration plant. Three hypotheses are on the table: renovation, reconstruction on another site and the status quo.
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