Fully carbon neutral Kuopion Portti

Heating and cooling for Kuopion Portti’s more than 30,000 square meters of floor area will be extracted on site from the bedrock. Adven has designed the property’s energy solutions to meet the environmental goals that the City of Kuopio set for the plot when the city plan was drawn up. Kuopion Portti will be an urban center offering passenger and other services, housing, office and commercial premises.

“Kuopion Portti’s energy self-sufficiency will come to more than 90 per cent, with the heating and cooling extracted from under the buildings,” says Risto Pekkarinen, regional director for Eastern Finland at Rakennusliike Lapti, part of the Lapti Group.

Kuopion Portti will be located centrally between the Kuopio railway station and travel center. Adven will be in charge of the energy supply for the properties and will remotely monitor Kuopion Portti’s energy center 24/7.

“In addition to carbon neutrality, the advantage of the solution designed and implemented by Adven is that the price of energy will be predictable and transparent well into the future. This has been a particularly interesting project from a design perspective, as Kuopion Portti’s buildings and their users have a variety of needs in terms of cooling and heating,” says Timo Koljonen, VP, Geoenergy at Adven Group.

“This project is a great example that geoenergy can also be utilized in city centers. The energy solution that we have planned will enable an ecological and carbon neutral urban center. The condensate heat is recycled and not released into the air, as it is often the case with traditional energy solutions. In addition, green electricity is used in heat pumps and solar panels are used on the roof of the parking facility,” tells Lasse Aitamaa, Project Manager at Adven Group.

The combined depth of the property’s geowells is 20,000 metres. The heat pump capacity of Kuopion Portti’s energy centre is 1,200 kWh, which corresponds to the heating power requirement of some 200 single-family homes. In addition, plans have been made to install a 2,000-square-metre solar panel field on the roof of the parking facility. The electricity generated by the solar panels will be used, among other things, for the lighting of the parking facility and for charging electric cars.

In addition to the commercial spaces, the residential buildings will also feature cooling extracted from the bedrock, doing away with the need for noisy condensers on the roof. Providing new homes with cooling is a growing trend in Nordic countries. Adven’s geoenergy offers the perfect solution for this – the same wells can also easily be used to produce cooling.