The close strategic partnership between Vantaa Energy and VTT has helped the energy company become a forerunner in creating a carbon neutral circular economy energy system.
Key facts
Vantaa Energy aims to be the leading circular energy company in the Nordics by 2035.
In the heating system to be built in Vantaa, the world’s largest thermal energy storage, waste heat and electric boilers provide the most competitive heating for the company’s clients. The system also includes advanced material recycling concepts, along with carbon capture and storage.
Forming a strategic partnership, we helped Vantaa Energy speed up its innovation process and provided access to cutting-edge innovation networks and the latest technology. This resulted in a concept for activities related to achieving carbon neutrality, combining the deep expertise of both organisations.
Vantaa Energy is one of Finland’s largest urban energy companies. Its goal is to solve the biggest challenges of our time by ensuring that energy and limited resources are circulated as smartly as possible. The company’s strategic target is to reach carbon neutral energy production, based on reducing emissions with a hybrid system combining the world’s largest thermal energy storage facility and various projects based on electric heating and waste heat. Achieving carbon neutrality requires also capturing carbon dioxide, a project currently in the pre-engineering phase at Vantaa Energy.
VTT provided us with deep expertise from several fields of research both from within their organisation and across their extensive partner network.
Combining deep expertise across research areas
Vantaa Energy positions itself as a local operator solving global challenges innovatively. It wants to set an example as a circular economy energy company for other cities and operators in the sector. According to Hanna Pitkänen, Senior Development Manager at Vantaa Energy, this innovative mindset is part of what led the company into discussions with VTT.
“Our ambitious strategic target of carbon neutral energy production required a deeper level of cooperation and ideation. When looking to create groundbreaking solutions we found VTT’s uniquely wide-ranging expertise especially valuable. We invested a lot of time into our mutual discussions and VTT was excellent in presenting ideas that we would never have initially thought of,” Pitkänen enthuses.
The most concrete example of this open-minded approach is Varanto – Vantaa Energy’s seasonal thermal energy storage facility, which is currently under construction. When completed in 2028, it will be the largest in the world in terms of size and capacity – with a total volume of 1.1 million cubic metres and the ability to store up to 90 GWh of thermal energy. The operating principle of the facility is to store heat in underground caverns so that it can be used to heat buildings via the district heating network whenever needed.
Pitkänen says that creating such an unprecedented facility wouldn’t have been possible without combining know-how from various industry sectors.
“VTT provided us with deep expertise from several fields of research both from within their organisation and across their extensive partner network. This has been crucial in developing completely new ways to utilise sustainable technologies.”
Creating novel solutions requires transparency
Antti Arasto, Vice President, Industrial energy and hydrogen at VTT, considers the exceptionally open and honest dialogue built up during the past few years of cooperation with Vantaa Energy one of the key success factors.
“We’ve been in different roles along the way, both offering solutions from our broad portfolio and searching for new ones together with third parties. I believe we’ve succeeded in being a neutral sparring partner, helping to analyse the different stages of Vantaa Energy’s path to reaching carbon neutrality,” Arasto says.
Miika Rämä, Research Team Leader, District heating and cooling at VTT, adds that in his view the cooperation has differed from typical R&D projects in its more transparent exchange of information and flexible scope for development work.
“Rather than focusing on a specific problem for which we attempt to find a solution, we have been granted access to extensive sources of data that enable us to truly think outside the box. The focus has been on discovering new solutions that best serve the customer’s interests,” Rämä explains.
Besides the Varanto thermal energy storage facility, we have been involved in the planning stages of several other renewable energy projects with Vantaa Energy. These include plans to capture and store carbon dioxide from all of the company’s waste-to-energy plants.
The multifaceted collaboration has seen us support Vantaa Energy, for example, in:
Flexible piloting and testing
Buyer’s consultancy requiring deep knowledge on novel technologies
Finance instrument applications
Industry foresight.
I have felt that we are on the same side and part of a team together with VTT.
Future-oriented approach supports circular economy strategy
Pitkänen points out that it’s important to have a neutral research partner such as VTT to create a trustworthy relationship for advancing solutions with larger societal impacts. VTT has also boldly challenged Vantaa Energy to consider a different option when the chosen route hasn’t been, for example, the most sustainable one in the long term. During the cooperation individual projects have evolved thanks to integrated expertise and an understanding of the entire hybrid energy system and sustainability targets.
“I have felt that we are on the same side and part of a team together with VTT, rather than being pushed to buy a solution that isn’t necessarily the best fit for us. I appreciate the way that VTT is independent of specific technologies and suppliers. They focus on finding a solution that serves our purposes in the long term and is also the most cost-efficient way of reaching our goals,” Pitkänen concludes.
