Sustainable heating and cooling at Oosterdokseiland, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Oosterdokseiland (East Docks Island), east of Amsterdam’s Central Station and south of the river IJ, is being redeveloped. In addition to residential and office development, there are plans to build a public library, a hotel, a conference centre, a number of cafes and restaurants, and Amsterdam’s academy of music. The energy needed for heating will be generated using heat pumps and underground energy storage, combined with boilers.

The store of energy, with a maximum cooling capacity of approximately 7MW, delivers around 11GWh of cooling in summer and around 9GWh of heating in winter. This gives a maximum flow of approximately 1,000m³/hour and 2,100,000m³ of pumped groundwater a year (abstraction and infiltration).

In winter, groundwater is extracted from the warm wells. The heat is transferred through heat exchangers installed in the control room to the cooled water distribution circuit, which carries the heat to the evaporators of the two-phase heat pumps. The cooled groundwater is re-infiltrated into the cold wells at a temperature of around 7°C.

In summer, cold groundwater is extracted from the cold wells in order to cool the buildings. Cold is transferred to the cooled water distribution circuit through heat exchangers. In addition to cooling provided by the wells, heat pumps can also be used as compression coolers. In this case, it’s possible to feed the condenser heat into the groundwater. Following the transfer of heat in the heat exchangers, the groundwater is re-infiltrated into the warm wells at an average temperature of around 18°C.