Marco Calderoni elected as New Chair of the RHC-ETIP

GEOFIT project coordinator, Marco Calderoni, was elected as new chair of the RHC-ETIP, the European Technology and Innovation Platform on Renewable Heating and Cooling. His mandate started on the 1st January 2021 and will run until the end of 2021. The RHC-ETIP represents stakeholders from the biomass, geothermal, solar thermal sectors, heat pumps, district heating and cooling, thermal storage and hybrid systems. It is, therefore, a unique ETIP covering all the renewable heating and cooling technologies.

Marco Calderoni takes over for Javier Urchueguía, RHC-ETIP Chairman in 2020. As key takeaways from his presidency period, Dr.Urchueguía pointed out the influential role of the RHC-ETIP to tip the balance of the budgetary distribution towards renewable heating and cooling. During his first meeting as Chairman of the RHC-ETIP, Marco Calderoni highlighted the potential positive impact of new alliances formed in 2020, such as the one with ETIP SNET and the Clean Energy Transition Partnership.

GEOFIT is already part of their project database and is now closer to the RHC Platform that it has been so far. Thus we can indirectly contribute to their work of maximising synergies and strengthening efforts towards research, development and technological innovation of Geothermal Energy within the European Union.

You can now read the full press release from RHC-ETIP here.

Completion of Civil Works at Perugia

Civil works began on December 3rd, 2020 at the Perugia Pilot. At that time, partner IDSGEORADAR performed a ground-penetrating radar measurements survey. Meanwhile, partner R2M operated UAV flights with and without a thermal camera. And all throughout the drilling phase, partner UNIPG completed the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM).

After one week, the works completed the shallow excavations of up to 2.5 meters deep. This meant the area was ready for the 50 centimeters of the sand bed that increases the conductivity on the ground.

Later, on January 11th, the company in charge of the fieldwork started the installation of the slinky GHEXs that go 2 meters deep. It considers 5 parallel trenches, with 1.35 m of mutual distance, 24 meters of average trench length, and 53 rings for each trench.

After the GHEXs installation, on January 18th, GROENHOLLAND came to the Perugia Pilot to install the fiber optic cable (FOC) monitoring. This technology has a particular approach that allows remote checking of the new system’s performance while matting underground temperature.

To increase the innovative aspects and the scientific relevance, UNIPG installed on the first two trenches, two parallel tubes of a drip plant that allows experimental evaluations and comparisons that consider different boundary conditions and configurations, such as with varying ground hydration content.

Drip plant in the first two trenches.

Finally, civil works were completed on January 28th as soon as all the excavated area was backfilled with an additional 50 cm of sand. Also, the ground excavated material was reused on-site.

Backfilling the area with other 50 cm of sand.

Furthermore, all the heating/cooling system components: heat pumps, boilers, tanks, are available on-site. And today, FAHRENHEIT’s chiller also arrived at Perugia!

Presently, UNIPG is working to complete the whole installation by the end of March and to move forward with the commissioning of the system.