The humble road can now help deliver heating and cooling to your home! A ‘thermo-road’ is doing just that for 12 terraced houses in Denmark’s Hedensted municipality, about 250 km west of Copenhagen.
At the same time, the road structure helps capture excess water to protect against flooding. The water is then released into the main sewage system in controlled amounts.
Heating and cooling are extracted from the road structure, from the road’s sewage pipe, and from three vertical closed-loop geothermal boreholes. The houses are linked by an underground thermal energy network called a ‘thermonet’. Each house has a small, energy-efficient geothermal heat pump installed.
Residents began moving into the houses in 2024, and initial measurements confirm a very low electricity consumption for operating the geothermal heat pumps.
When the cooling function becomes operational, the houses’ floors can be kept cool during summer. Electricity consumption for cooling is expected to be around one-tenth that of a conventional air conditioning unit. Cooling is passive, achieved solely by circulating water at ground temperature through underfloor pipes via the thermonet. This will be increasingly useful, with forecasts suggesting that Denmark could face southern European summer temperatures by mid-century.
The project is the result of collaboration between Hedensted Municipality and seven public and private partners and is supported by the Danish Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Programme (EUDP).
