Official opening of new centre will provide low-carbon heating to people and businesses across city
The Titanic Hotel in Liverpool hosted the official opening of the Mersey Heat Energy Centre, an ambitious new enterprise to provide low-carbon heating to buildings across Liverpool.
Mersey Heat Energy Centre, photo courtesy of Vital Energi
The centre extracts heat from the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and shares it with local buildings. It has the potential to serve up to 17,000 homes across the city. It is already serving the famous Titanic Hotel and Tobacco Warehouse, and will soon heat the multi-billion pound Liverpool Waters Development.
Vital Energi were appointed in 2019 to design, build and maintain the centre, working in partnership with commercial consultants Ener-Vate and infrastructure investment company The Peel Group.
The opening was attended by Cllr Liam Robinson, Leader of Liverpool City Council and Cabinet Member for Innovation at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, as well as Cllr Anthony Burns, Leader of St Helens Borough Council and Net Zero Cabinet Leader for the Liverpool City Region.
Jo Longdon, Strategy and Development Director at Ener-Vate, has worked on the project for the last eight years. In a video posted to YouTube, she says: ‘The energy centre has the generating kit in it, which is the large water source heat pump taking heat out of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and transferring it into useable heat.
‘The energy centre is a big central-heating system that is doing that work. It’s got a large thermal store, which is just like having a hot-water tank. We take water out which is between 4 and 10 degrees, depending on the heat and the weather. We extract that heat, compress it through the heat pump and also then add extra heat to it in the energy centre to get it up to a useable temperature of about 90 degrees. Then we flow it around the pipes in the system and the buildings just take what temperatures they need.’
‘The amount of heat it actually takes from the building,’ says Longdon, depends, ‘on the building [and] what it’s been designed [for].’
Cllr Robinson calls this is, ‘A really exciting project and the first of a number of heat networks we’re looking to roll out across the city [and] city region.’
Cllr Burns adds: ‘Mersey Heat is a fantastic example of what we can do when we collaborate on innovation, in collaboration with our partners. It’s much more than the infrastructure that we’re putting in here, it’s about creating greener energy and reaching our net-zero target.
‘The extension of the pipeline will then mean that we connect George’s Dock, the Cunard building and the Museum of Liverpool, too. So it’s not just about what we’re doing here, but it’s about making sure that our buildings are connected. Hopefully, we’ll see the extension of the Mersey Heat Network across the Liverpool City Region.’
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