The district heating (DH) industry has been characterized by continuous innovation for several decades, but there is limited knowledge on the characteristics of the sector’s innovation activities, arguably the most important information for understanding how the sector can continue to develop and further support the energy transition of society. We perform a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the types of innovation, the levels of innovation and the relation between different innovations in the DH sector. A total of 899 articles are analyzed and coded into eight groups: fuel, supply, distribution, transfer, DH system, city system, impact and business. Most of the articles (68%) were identified in the groups: “supply”, “DH system,” and “impact”, with a focus on DH from a system or production perspective and its environmental impact. We find that there is limited research on DH firms” challenges, including management perspectives, such as asset management and customer focus. Despite this potential, we find only a limited number of articles related to innovation. Not much scholarly attention has been given to areas of large cost-saving, especially capital cost.
The district heating (DH) industry is facing an important transformation towards more efficient networks that utilise significantly lower water temperatures to distribute the heat. This change requires taking advantage of new technologies, and Machine Learning (ML) is a popular direction. In the last decade, we have witnessed an extreme growth in the number of published research papers that focus on applying ML techniques to the DH domain. However, based on our experience in the field, and an extensive review of the state-of-the-art, we perceive a mismatch between the most popular research directions, such as forecasting, and the challenges faced by the DH industry. In this work, we present our findings, explain and demonstrate the key gaps between the two communities and suggest a road-map ahead towards increasing the impact of ML research in the DH industry.
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