Heat Roadmap Europe: Heat distribution costs

Highlights: • Introduction of suitability concepts for district heating. • The EU28 land use area is divided into 437 million pieces. • 1.4% of the EU28 land area hosts 78% of building heat demands. • Most EU28 member states, not only Nordic, have good conditions for district heating. -- Abstract: This analysis elaborates further the concept of physical and economic suitability for district heating in EU28 by an aggregation regarding key dimensions such as land areas, populations, heat demands, and investment volumes. This aggregation is based on a resolution on hectare level by slicing the total land area into 437 million pieces. Results show that heat demands in buildings are present in 9% of the land area. Because of high concentrations in towns and cities, 78% of the total heat demand in buildings originate from dense urban areas that constitute 1.4% of the total land area and 70% of the population. Due to these high heat densities above 50 MJ/m² per year, the paper evaluates a setting where district heating is individually expanded in each member state for reaching a common 50% heat market proportion in EU28 at lowest cost. At this saturation rate, the aggregated EU28 district heat deliveries would increase to 5.4 EJ/a at current heat demands and represents an expansion investment volume, starting from current level of 1.3 EJ, of approximately 270 billion euro for heat distribution pipes. Given the current high heat densities in European urban areas, this study principally confirms earlier expectations by quantitative estimations.