Articles
AMER HEAT: PENETRATING A NEW MARKET
We distribute electricity, natural gas, district heating and water and exploit community aerial systems in the province of North Brabant in the southern part of the country.
PNEM is the largest energy distributor in The Netherlands.
We have some 2,600 employees.
Our annual turnover is approximately 2 billion guilders, or 870 million ECU.
In response to government policies on the environment we are extending our field of operations to energy saving services and environmental services.
To limit the greenhouse effect our goal is to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxyde by 10 percent in the year 2000. District heating is one of the spearheads in our actions to achieve that goal.
The systems set up for the two cities are aiming at the tradional customers for district heating: houses, apartment buildings, offices, schools, hospitals, factories.
There is however an other group of major consumers of heat in the Netherlands: greenhouse market gardeners.
We have an ambivilant relationship with the greenhouse effect.
On a small scale we use it in glass – or greenhouse horticulture.
Agriculture and horticulture are among the most important economical activities in Holland.
Peppers from Holland and Tulips from Amsterdam are famous.
With an export of 56 billion guilders – 24 billion ECU – we are the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world.
Many of those products are grown in glass houses.
We have more than 9,600 hectares of those.
In that form the small scale greenhouse effect is an essential factor in our economy.
You won’t be surprised if I tell you that the Dutch climate doesn’t offer enough heat of its own all year round for glass house horticulture.
Additional heating of glass houses is necessary.
Usually the market gardeners use individual boilers for that.
Some 3.5 billion cubical meters natural gas per annum are burned for that purpose.
This is 8.5 percent of the total use of natural gas in the country.
Penetrating in that heat market became our aim.
There was however one problem: there were no market gardeners in the surroundings of the power station or the already existing district heating systems.
What really is essential in the whole operation, although you may not believe me on this