Green Utrecht

Utrecht is one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands, founded over 1,200 years ago and situated in the heart of Holland. With its 300,000 inhabitants, Utrecht is the fourth biggest city in the Netherlands. Its central position makes the city the infrastructural intersection of the Netherlands.

Utrecht Central Station

Utrecht is expanding. The number of people making use of inner city facilities is growing and the number of passengers handled by Utrecht Central Station, central hub in the Dutch railway system, will double in the next twenty years to an estimated 100 million travellers per year. In order to facilitate this growth, the City of Utrecht is working in collaboration with the Ministries of Transport and Spatial Planning, the Corio firm (which owns the Hoog Catharijne shopping centre linked to the railway station), the Jaarbeurs Utrecht trade fair centre and NS Real Estate to achieve a complete makeover of the area.

Sustainable development

A project of this magnitude offers a unique opportunity for more sustainable urban development in the inner city. As part of the plan, the entire area will be outfitted with heat exchangers. This method uses ground storage to collect cold, which is available in quantity in winter in the form of cold outside air or cold surface water. The stored cold can be used in the summer to cool equipment and rooms. Similarly, in summer the heat that is released when cooling the buildings can be stored in the ground and reused in winter. Ground storage of heat and cold is an environmentally friendly and energy-efficient alternative for conventional cooling/heating systems. The use of heat exchangers on such a large scale offers another advantage. Like any other city, Utrecht has to deal with contaminated soil. Utrecht will apply a “bio-scrubber” to decontaminate the soil. The use of heat exchangers will produce a constant movement of surface water. This movement will be put to use to purify contaminated soil in an area of roughly 6 million square metres. Adding carefully selected bacteria to the constant surge will accelerate the purification process in an environmentally friendly way. These plans will both secure Utrecht’s position as the infrastructural intersection of the Netherlands as well as a cleaner and energy-saving inner city.

Frontrunner

Utrecht is one of Holland’s frontrunners in sustainability. The city council aims to achieve a climate neutral organisation by 2012. To meet this challenge, the city will need to compensate some 35,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions. A large part of this compensation will be realised by supplying green energy. Sustainability is high on the agenda in Utrecht, as clearly shown by the city’s ambitious plans for meeting the challenges of an ever-growing inner city.