The Seine featuring the Saint Alexander III Bridge and the Eifel Tower – CC 2.0. ilirjan rrumbullaku
The world’s most romantic river also helps prevent residents from getting all hot and bothered, cooling their offices and homes through a heat transfer system.
Currently, around 60 miles of piping channels water to and from the Seine in Paris, but it has nothing to do with plumbing. Rather, this network, which includes pumps and heat exchangers, naturally cool 800 Paris buildings.
The heat exchanger works by bringing the cool temperatures of the Seine’s undercurrent and using them to cool the air that circulates through the buildings. The water gradually absorbs the heat that was present in the air, and when it loses its cool, it returns to the Seine to deposit that thermal energy into the water.
Water is 800 times denser than air, so using it to store temperatures is much more efficient. It’s so efficient that the Seine’s district cooling services are set to more than double through ongoing expansion work.
Those 100 kilometers of pipes are set to become 245 kilometers, allowing the system to welcome an additional 2,200 buildings into the fold.
Another advantage district cooling has, and one reason why it’s so desired in central or downtown districts, is that there’s no heat discharge back out into the city. Air conditioners pump heat into the alleyways and streets they face, contributing to the urban heat island effect that is more intense the more buildings there are.
One of the system’s largest clients is none other than the world’s most famous museum. The Louvre uses 12 megawatts of cooling power—12-times more than the average building—to keep its countless galleries and halls at the ideal temperature and humidity for preserving artifacts and works of art. That means the only cost of cooling this massive underground building is the cost of pumping the water.
Compared to other district cooling systems that use deep, colder lakes rather than shallow, UNESCO-protected rivers, the capacity for the Seine to expand is minimal. The riverbed cannot be deepened, while excavating to lay new pipes is excruciatingly slow because of the layers of history in a city like Paris and the requirements for archaeological surveying.
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But the city is experiencing extreme heatwaves routinely during the summers; each of the last 4 years included, and access to cooler spaces is becoming more and more of a priority; somewhat like how warm spaces were 100 years ago.
In the 19th century, one could go swimming in the Seine if it got too hot, a possibility that was gradually removed by rampant pollution. But with the clean-up of the Seine complete, Paris has now effectively doubled its cooling power—by refreshing those both in and out of river.
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GNN has also reported on the brilliance of district heating systems, which, like the Seine’s cooler depths, utilize excess heat produced by factories and data centers to warm water that is transferred to office spaces. There, it heats the air that circulates through the building before being pumped back into reservoirs under the factories to be re-heated again.
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