Innsbruck utility company replaces last oil heater

The IKB explained that this leg of the fight against climate change is over for them

Today, the Innsbruck Municipal Company (IKB – Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe) announced that they have replaced the last oil heating system in their facilities. The IKB explained that starting today, none of their facilities will use oil for heating in what they describe as a role model initiative for sustainable action.

The IKB is a public, private company with majority shares owned by the city of Innsbruck. It handles most of the local public infrastructure, including electricity, gas, wastewater treatment, water, telecommunications and even public baths and saunas.

Some heroes use heat pumps

The popular phrase goes ‘Some heroes don’t wear capes’. And now some heroes also use heat pumps. This is what the IKB did when they decided to remove the last oil heating system in their Untere Sill hydroelectric plant.

The oil heating system previously supplied the nearby office building, as well as several residential buildings, including 17 apartments. According to the company, the replacement heat pumps will save up to 20,000 litres of heating oil per year. At the same time, they have explained that this move alone would save the city 64,200 kilograms of CO2 emissions per year.

As one of the biggest companies in Innsbruck, as well as a part of the public services provider of the city, ditching fossil-fuelled heating systems is a major move for the IKB. All the while, the news that this was the last such device gives weary Europeans a glimmer of hope that the energy dependency has a foreseeable end, somewhere on the horizon.

The heat-pump system in the Untere Sill facility would extract the waste heat, produced by the machinery and generators and feed it back into the office and residential buildings, using water as a medium. In this way, according to the company, they will use the produced energy twice.

According to an IKB spokesman, the company can also expand this service by offering it to the citizens of Innsbruck, although, they have yet to explain what form that initiative would take.