Advantages & Benefits

Advantages of a district heating network

District heating networks provide the means to transport heat efficiently. They can currently be built up to around 30km from generating plant and distribution networks can be hundreds of kilometres long. This is sufficient to carry heat across our cities, smaller communities and industrial areas. The distance a network can reach is also easily extended by simply adding more providers of heat, or ‘heat sources’, along the way.

A heat network enables valuable energy, which currently is all too often wasted in power generation or industrial processes, to be harnessed and delivered to a point of use. This removes the need for additional energy to be generated. It also allows for economies of scale, as the generation of heat in one large plant can often be more efficient than production in multiple smaller ones.

• Heat networks can also be supplied with heat from a diverse range of sources. These include:
• power stations
• energy from waste (EfW) facilities
• industrial processes
• biomass and biogas fuelled boilers and CHP plants
• gas-fired CHP units
• fuel cells
• heat pumps
• geothermal sources
• electric boilers and even solar thermal arrays

The ability to integrate diverse energy sources means customers are not dependent upon a single source of supply. This helps guarantee reliability, continuity of service and can introduce an element of competition into the supply chain.

Networks also have the ability to balance the supply and generation of heat, across location and over time. Over the course of the day, heat demand shifts between residential consumers to commercial, industrial and public buildings and back again. A heat network can match and manage these flows, whilst maximising the utilisation of the plant providing the heat. Demand can also be managed across seasons, with networks supporting the operation of distributed absorption cooling plants in the summer providing cooling on a significant scale.

Benefits of heat networks

District heating networks provide the following direct benefits:

• enabling the efficient transportation and use of heat for a wide variety of users
• allowing a broad range of energy generation technologies to work together to meet demand for heat
• enabling fuel flexibility
• helping to efficiently manage supply and demand of energy
• lowering costs of energy generation
• dramatically increasing fuel efficiency through use of CHP
• reducing labour and maintenance cost as compared to individual systems

These in turn deliver a range of beneficial outcomes:

• provides a means of securing significant reduction in CO2 emissions through the optimisation of heat supply in the UK
• extending the reach of renewables, by using renewable heat efficiently and providing opportunities for the deployment of renewable technologies that otherwise wouldn’t be viable
• improving security of supply