for this issue of our heatbeat Research Newsletter, we noticed that in addition to the continuous output of great research papers, several interesting reports have been published last month. Thus, we want to give you an overview of some of the reports that have caught our attention recently. In this context, two reports each by EuroHeat&Power as well as by the Accompanying Scientific Research for Energiewendebauen Research Initiative in Germany have caught our interest. In the following, we give you a short overview and links to all the freely available reports below.

Digitalization of District Heating Networks

EuroHeat&Power and its DHC+ network have published a new whitepaper on Digitalisation of District Heating and Coooling Systems - A tangible perspective to upgrade performance. The report asserts that DHC systems face increasingly complex challenges and that we have reached a point where there is a promising supply of digital solutions but a gap with regard to the adoption and demand of such services.

One central point of the report is that digitalization should not focus only on the supply side and the network, but offers its largest potential when also the buildings and customers are considered as part of a holistic system approach. Yet, this topic also touches on data privacy challenges, which need to be considered and addressed. As an example to a solution of this conflict of interest, the report mentions Denmark as the only country with a clear regulation on this topic, where utilities are allowed to use smart meter data as long as it is not disclosed to third parties and only used in public interest of making the system more efficient.

And in the second part of the report, several examples are listed that show successful implementations of digitalization processes in district heating. These examples include e.g. performance and temperature optimizations, sector-coupling, forecasts, and fault detection based on monitoring data.

District Heating and Cooling Market Outlook 2023

Futhermore, EuroHeat&Power has also published their 2023 DHC market outlook. Regarding the fundamentals of the current situations of DHC in Europe, the report lists the total sum of network lengths in Europe as 190,000 km, supplying 70 million people with heat. And in a very promising insight, the report shows that in 2021, more than 43 % of the district heating supply was provided by renewable energy and waste heat.

For the whole of Europe, the report shows that in 2021 district heating amounted to heat sales of nearly 500 TWh. Yet, the shares of district heating vary a lot between different countries, with e.g. Iceland covering more of 90 % of the residential and service sectors, while in countries like Germany this share is around 10 %. The total installed capacity in of thermal power for district heating is listed as around 300 GW, with Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic having the highest absolute values of installed power. At the same time, the network lengths are highest in Denmark, Germany, and Poland.

Regarding the installation of large-scale heat pumps as supply to district heating, the report shows that currently Sweden, Finland, and Denmark lead the way, while it will be interesting to see the future growth of this technology in all of Europe. For the future, the report gives an outlook of connecting another 5 million households to district heating across Europe until 2030. For several countries, the report also includes country-specific outlooks, so we recommend to have a look into the report for your specific interests.

Effects of Changing Costs on the Future of District Heating

In Germany, many energy research projects are not only directly funded, but also take part in cross-analysis and knowledge exchange organized by the Accompanying Scientific Research for Energiewendebauen Research Initiative. And this research initiative has just published 2 interesting reports. Both reports are available in German only, but we think the main take-aways can be interesting for an international audience, too. The first report is titled Einfluss aktueller Kostenentwicklungen auf Wärmenetze and evaluates the effects of currently changing costs on district heating.

Regarding fuel costs, the report shows that the high gas prices currently hit people in rented apartments with gas-fired heating and no retrofits the hardest while the cost increases in heat from district heating were significantly lower in Germany. Yet, the report also shows that district heating in Germany is still affected by higher fuel prices due to a continuing large share of fossil fuels in the generation mix. As a result, there can be cost advantages for decentral heat pumps.

In general, the report emphasizes the fact that the increasing fuel costs accelerate the need to transform the heating sector in Germany towards a fossil-free future and that district heating is seen to play a major role in this. Yet, the report also points out that significantly increased construction costs are another major challenge for this transformation process. To address such challenges, the report contains several examples that showcase some currently running 47 publicly funded research projects in Germany that are related to district heating.

Experiences from Municipal Heat Planning in Germany

And a second report from the same research initiative focuses on first experiences from municipal heat planning in Germany. This is the result of a cluster meeting involving several research projects. One of the take-aways is that it is important to consider the different stakeholders and their roles in the process of municipal heat planning. A central learning is that it helps to involve both the municipality as well as local utilities as soon as possible and to define the responsibilities of each actor for the process.

Another part of the report is a collection of different challenges encountered in the research projects. These include missing business models and incentives for a truly holistic approach to a future energy system including sector-coupling and prosumers, as well as uncertainties regarding future regulation, and shortages of qualified personnel to actually implement changes like retrofitting buildings and building new energy infrastructure.

Furthermore, the report addresses the crucial topic of data quality, which is currently not openly available for each building in Germany. This means that each municipal heat planning process must collect its data from different sources, which can be cumbersome and delay the process. And it also makes knowledge transfers from one city to the next more difficult. Therefore, the report recommends a common data platform as a foundation for the future.

Further information

The next issue of our newsletter will be published on July 5, 2023. In the meantime, we invite you to have a look at our redesigned blog and follow us on LinkedIn.