Flexible heating as a service

Challenge

The project will develop "heat as a service," making it as easy to be a CO2-friendly heat customer on a sector-coupled district heating network as it is to purchase a mobile subscription. A sector-coupled energy system requires balancing consumption and optimizing the use of the district heating network’s capacity, so it is geared to handle fluctuating production from renewable sources and other sectors. This will be achieved by developing and optimizing the interaction between plants, the business model for heat customers, a digitized network, and smart district heating tariffs.

Solution

New plants in buildings today can optimize the local heating system within the building but may sub-optimize the district heating network, which reduces system efficiency and hinders opportunities for sector coupling. The project partners will test and demonstrate plants and components that optimize the system as a whole, rather than just the building, and develop a business model that makes it attractive for large consumers to invest in the tested plants.

To ensure optimal utilization of surplus heat, greater digitization of heat distribution in the district heating system is required, providing real-time oversight of the system's status and capacity. Through the project, Kamstrup and DIN Forsyning will adapt the digital pipeline model, enabling the possibility to send “price signals” to building automation, thereby creating energy-efficient optimizations for the entire system rather than just at the building level.

One of the challenges in the green transition of the energy system is to create the right framework for utilizing conversion losses in sector couplings. The existing framework conditions were developed for a fossil energy system. In a sector-coupled energy system, consumption must be managed based on the availability of green energy, which must be directly reflected in prices – and district heating tariffs should support, not hinder, this. Therefore, the project will also develop an alternative model for district heating tariffs and, through practical demonstration, document and showcase the effects so the model can be quickly scaled.