Iceland
January 28, 2025
Warmed cooling water heats residential area
In Iceland, warm cooling water from the production process at the Akureyri site is used to heat a residential area in the nearby town. A total of 80 gigawatt hours of heat energy is fed into the district heating network every year. This covers about 14 percent of the heating needs of Akureyri and supplies about 2,500 households with previously unused energy from TDK.
“The agreement between us and the municipal utility Nordurorka, which is responsible for Akureyri, is a very ecological use of our energy,” says Norbert Kardos, COO at the Akureyri site. The energy of the warm cooling water from the production process is fed into the municipal heating network via a heat exchanger at around 65°C and then passed on to households for heating. Since the heat supply in the region is reaching its limits, according to Nordurorka, possibilities are currently being explored to use even more waste energy from TDK to heat more households.
From left: Baldur Vidar Jónsson, Deputy Chief Engineer Nordurorka, Gunnar Gunnarsson, Technical Manager TDK Foil Iceland, and Eythór Bjoernsson, CEO Nordurorka.
In Iceland, TDK forms films for aluminum electrolytic capacitors in special baths, which requires an enormous amount of energy: Akureyri accounts for more than half of TEG's total electricity needs. The extremely energy-intensive production was one of the main reasons for the site being established in Iceland in 2007. 100 percent of the electricity is generated from renewable energy sources. Around 70 percent comes from hydropower and the rest from geothermal energy.
Akureyri is with around 18,500 inhabitants the commercial and service center in the north of Iceland and the second largest urban area in Iceland after the capital region of Reykjavík.
The Akureyri site in northern Iceland covers an area of around 42,000 square meters.
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