If it is up to the Municipal Executive of Rotterdam, there will be no connection from the heat network from the port of Rotterdam to Leiden. That connection was necessary to keep the ailing Warmtebedrijf Rotterdam afloat, but it entails too many financial risks, says Alderman Arjan van Gils of Finance and Majeure Projects. The City Council will vote on the proposal next week. reports Rijnmond.
Het Warmtebedrijf was founded in 2006 to provide homes with heat using residual heat from the port of Rotterdam. The municipality of Rotterdam is the largest shareholder. It was initially expected that 300,000 to 500,000 homes in Rotterdam would use it, but it did not become more than 60,000.
By involving Leiden as a new sales market in the project, the Heat Company should have been saved. The contract for supply to Leiden has also already been signed with energy supplier Vattenfall. But the construction of the pipeline was confronted with many setbacks.
A plan to transport the heat via Zoeterwoude to Leiden was exchanged last year for a route via Rijswijk. Then Rotterdam could join a pipeline that Gasunie wants to lay to The Hague and extend an extra pipeline to Leiden from there. In this way, the contract with Vattenfall could still be fulfilled.
State aid
The risks to that plan are now also considered too great. According to Van Gils, it is not certain that Gasunie will build the pipeline to The Hague and the private parties involved do not want to contribute enough. This also puts a promised amount of 30 million euros from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate at risk, because the European Commission can then classify the investment by the central government and the municipality as state aid instead of subsidy.
The fact that the plan is not going ahead probably means that the Warmtebedrijf Rotterdam will go bankrupt. It is not known how much money that will cost, but it may be hundreds of millions of euros. In 2019 the Rotterdam Court of Audit found even though the municipality had taken irresponsible risks with the Heat Company, both in the initial phase and later by concluding a contract with Nuon – Vattenfall’s predecessor – in Leiden, without being sure whether the pipeline would be completed.
Due to climate change, the use of residual heat as an alternative to gas remains attractive: “So it could just be that a new start will be made with other parties, who will then make the damage very clear.” The heat from the houses that are connected to the grid in Rotterdam will in any case be guaranteed, alderman Van Gils told Rijnmond.
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