• Energy Research

Urban waste heat recovery, in which low temperature heat from urban sources is recovered for use in a district heat network, has a great deal of potential in helping to achieve 2050 climate goals. For example, heat from data centres, metro systems, public sector buildings and waste water treatment plants could be used to supply 10% of Europe’s heat demand. Despite this, at present, urban waste heat recovery is not widespread and is an immature technology. Based on interviews with urban waste heat stakeholders, investors interested in green investments, and experience from demonstrator projects, a number of recommendations are made. It is suggested that policy raising awareness of waste heat recovery, encouraging investment and creating a legal framework should be implemented. It is also recommended that pilot projects should be promoted to help demonstrate technical and economic feasibility. A pilot credit facility is suggested aimed at bridging the gap between potential investors and heat recovery projects.

Approximately 1.2 EJ of energy are potentially available for recovery each year from urban heat sources in the EU. This corresponds to more than 10 percent of the EU’s total energy demand for heat and hot water. There are, however, a number of challenges to be met before urban waste heat recovery can be performed on a wide scale. This paper focuses on the non-technical issues related to urban waste heat recovery and is written on the basis of opinions gathered from stakeholders in the field. Three non-technical issues are focused upon. First, a number of important barriers to wide scale urban waste recovery are identified, and where applicable, recommendations are made regarding how to overcome these barriers. Second, important issues and challenges regarding contract design are identified and discussed. Key elements of heat supply contracts between the district heating company and the owner of the waste heat are described. Finally, the impact on business models of properties specific to urban waste heat recovery are discussed. Data were collected from two separate sources, both related to the ReUseHeat Horizon 2020 project, which addresses the application of urban waste heat recovery in existing district heating networks. First, a number of interviews with stakeholders were carried out. Second, information was collected from demonstrator sites involved in the ReUseHeat project. It was concluded that, for urban waste heat recovery to be taken up on a wide scale, there is still a large amount of work to do to overcome these major issues. This paper is novel in that key non-technical issues of urban waste heat recovery are discussed from the perspective of a large sample of actual stakeholders and practitioners in the field.

District heating is a network of pipes through which heat is delivered from a centralised source. It is expected to play an important role in the decarbonisation of the energy sector in the coming years. In district heating, heat is traditionally generated through fossil fuels, often with combined heat and power (CHP) units. However, increasingly, waste heat is being used as a low carbon alternative, either directly or, for low temperature sources, via a heat pump. The design of district heating often has competing objectives: the need for inexpensive energy and meeting low carbon targets. In addition, the planning of district heating schemes is subject to multiple sources of uncertainty such as variability in heat demand and energy prices. This paper proposes a decision support tool to analyse and compare system designs for district heating under uncertainty using stochastic ordering (dominance). Contrary to traditional uncertainty metrics that provide statistical summaries and impose total ordering, stochastic ordering is a partial ordering and operates with full probability distributions. In our analysis, we apply the orderings in the mean and dispersion to the waste heat recovery problem in Brunswick, Germany.