Sharing: the energy concept at the heart of London’s dock development
Silvertown will be home to the UK's first development using E.ON's pioneering ectogrid™ system - connecting all the buildings together to make the most efficient use of energy across the community.
We’re waging a war on waste. Waste heat that is.
Traditional energy systems push heating – or cooling – one-way, from the generation source (like your boiler) to where it’s needed (your radiators) and that’s the end of it.
But what if that wasn’t the end of it? What if we could use it again and again, making use of heating and cooling sources across different properties, even across different buildings?
We’re doing just that at a brand-new development at Silvertown on London’s Royal Docks.
Silvertown will be home to the largest ambient heating and cooling network in the UK and the first development of its kind in the UK to use our pioneering ectogrid™ system.
ectogrid™ is a circular energy system that will not only reduce the demand for energy supplied into its system by up to 75%, it will also significantly cut carbon emissions into the city air, with 88% lower emissions than from traditional gas boilers.
ectogrid™ works by adjusting its temperature to the surrounding environment and only adding new energy – heating in the winter, cooling in the summer –when all available energy within the network has been fully shared.
Each connected building captures any excess heating or cooling and shares to neighbouring buildings as needed, and by sharing, balancing, and storing energy in rotation, all available energy is used before any ‘new’ energy is added.
You can see on the diagram that the core energy source for Silvertown is the energy centre – on the far right of the diagram with the green roof (the picture below is our temporary energy centre, already under construction, which will serve the energy needs of the first phases of the Silvertown development).
This energy centre is fitted with heat pumps and chillers that provide an efficient source of heating and cooling into the network.
But the key part is that all buildings on the development are also interconnected, 'talking' to one another and sharing energy between one another so they can balance out the energy needs between them.
And in the future, we can call on other sources of heating and cooling – like manufacturing sites, data centres, even the Underground and use that heat across the buildings. That means waste doesn’t go to waste.