Katri Vala Heat Pump Plant
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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✎ Corrected 27 Aug 2026 Publication date recorded for 3 sources. What changed →
Since 2006, Helen has run heat pumps in a rock cavern beneath Katri Vala Park that extract heat and cooling from purified wastewater leaving the Viikinmäki treatment plant, now at 160MW heating / 100MW cooling after a 2023 expansion — distinct from Helen's newer Salmisaari seawater-tunnel project, still under construction.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →🎓 Lesson
Every number here is Helen's own, and two of them moved between the announcement and the ribbon: the 2020 release put the finished plant at 155 MW of heat and 103.5 MW of cooling, the 2023 completion release at 160 MW and 100 MW. The over-1,000 GWh a year is a plant output figure, not a measured displacement — what it replaces depends on what would otherwise have run, and the utility only framed the plant as a coal-replacement instrument in 2020, fourteen years after it opened as its first heat-pump investment. The zero-emission claim rests on the electricity that drives the pumps: heat pumps move heat, they do not make it, so the plant is exactly as clean as the power behind it.
Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 7 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 7 addressable claims, 3 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 7
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-8b72ec7e8087b4bf
quantitative
Since 2006, Helen has run heat pumps in a rock cavern beneath Katri Vala Park that extract heat and cooling from purified wastewater leaving the Viikinmäki treatment plant
Sources carrying this claim
clm-fcf0c16add5bd432
quantitative
now at 160MW heating / 100MW cooling after a 2023 expansion
Sources carrying this claim
clm-b4f76b4fa22a6fe4
descriptive
distinct from Helen's newer Salmisaari seawater-tunnel project, still under construction
Sources carrying this claim
clm-79b64a59bdf5c9d2
quantitative
Recovers over 1,000GWh of heat per year from purified wastewater and district-cooling return water, enough to cover most of central Helsinki's district heating demand during summer
Sources carrying this claim
clm-4af0fd56674e2154
quantitative
the 2020 release put the finished plant at 155 MW of heat and 103.5 MW of cooling, the 2023 completion release at 160 MW and 100 MW
Sources carrying this claim
clm-309dec8fda2515e6
quantitative
the utility only framed the plant as a coal-replacement instrument in 2020, fourteen years after it opened as its first heat-pump investment
Sources carrying this claim
clm-059f1c5af946d3ca
descriptive
The zero-emission claim rests on the electricity that drives the pumps
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:977a17c7bf99bafbff2db989190911e62fb4c153cece632bddc65fde9fcfb094
- 7
- of 7 claims mapped
- 3
- source dossiers
- 2
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Helen
- Actor types
- utility
- Funding model
- utility
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
3 source dossiers
Helen (operator) — Katri Vala expansion completed (28 September 2023)
- Stable source ID
src-f39883d8598979d2- Publisher
- Name not classified · helen.fi
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2023-09-28
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-24
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
2023 announcement of the completed 7-pump expansion: 160MW heating / 100MW cooling, 1,000+GWh/year.
Helen (operator) — seventh heat pump announced (16 April 2020)
- Stable source ID
src-e475437d7633307e- Publisher
- Name not classified · helen.fi
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2020-04-16
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-24
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
2020 announcement of the final expansion pump; gives 2006 commissioning date and pre-expansion capacity figures.
Circle Economy Knowledge Hub (independent)
- Stable source ID
src-3c89ec9fe982b656- Publisher
- Name not classified · circle-economy.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-24
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
The knowledge-hub article did not return a readable body to automated retrieval; the figures in this entry rest on the two operator releases. No publication date is recorded: the page did not answer when this entry was checked.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Katri Vala Heat Pump Plant” — Helsinki, Finland. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/helsinki-katri-vala-heat-pump/ (last verified 2026-07-24). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.