Municipal heating planning

Municipal heating planning serves cities and municipalities as a strategic foundation for preparing the municipality for the transition towards sustainable heat production. The municipalities develop individual roadmaps to provide the necessary energy with sustainable methods. On the one hand, the heat demand of buildings and industries is determined in the municipality, on the other hand, existing or potential heat sources are identified and compared to the demand.

Also here, we use our heatbeat Digital Twin, making the models scalable and simplifying them for the usage in municipal heating planning. To do this, we use as much digitally available information as possible. For example, we automated the process to collect the number of buildings and all available information for the buildings (for example, usage, number of floors and years of construction). In addition to those public sources, individual information from the municipality can also be easily imported into our Digital Twin. All building information is stored, geo-referenced in our database and can be continuously validated and modified by the municipality. We then assign a dynamic demand to each building. For this purpose, we subdivide the buildings into different types specific to the community. Those can differ, for example, in terms of the age of the building, the year of retrofit, its usage and location. We draw on multiple years of research results from RWTH Aachen University in the field of dynamic modeling of various types of buildings. Using the demand, we create heat maps and determine heat densities in the municipality so that areas with particularly high demands can be identified. Together with the municipality and other stakeholders (e.g. housing associations), we identify the potential of retrofit for the buildings and present the development of the heat demand in our interactive view over a timespan of several years.

In a second step, we work with the municipality and other stakeholders to identify possible heat sources. These include environmental energy (ambient air, heat from waste water, geothermal energy, aquathermal energy, etc.) and especially waste heat from industrial processes. We identify the dynamic potential here as well, so that we can easily map supply and demand. This allows us to identify where investment in a district heating network is particularly suitable and where alternative decarbonization implementations make more sense (e.g. heat pumps). This is because a particular aspect of heating planning is sector coupling to the electricity sector. For this purpose, we match our data with solar grids and calculate possible PV-gains.

We make our results available as interactive data so that they can be used to interact with other stakeholders in municipal heating planning. For this purpose we of course offer workshops with technical and non-technical focus. Municipal heating planning can also be funded. Please feel free to contact us for advise on this topic.