Technical, Financial and Urban Potentials for Solar District Heating in Italy

Heat transmission over long pipes: New model for fast and accurate district heating simulations

“…However, traditional European combined heat and power (CHP)-based DH systems risk losing their attractiveness in terms of energy efficiency, CO 2 emissions savings, and financial profitability. The current energy framework introduces new challenges for DH [3]: the increase of renewables in power production and the parallel decrease of electricity consumption [4] have reduced the use of CHP plants, while the majority of DH systems usually recover their rejected heat. The search for waste heat to be recovered and the exploitation of local renewable energy sources have become concrete alternatives: DH utilities exhibit an increasing amount of waste heat and renewable energy distributed along the network.…”

Heat Roadmap Europe: strategic heating transition typology as a basis for policy recommendations

“…As in the other types, policies that can support the development of flexible CHP and large-scale heat pumps are required, in particular with regard to where new plants are placed (to ensure future connection to networks), as well as the active incentivisation of efficient heat pumps. Examples of these technologies, methodologies, and practices do exist, as well as succesful attempts to explore quantified overall market potentials (for example, Denarie, Calderoni, and Muschera, 2017;Lizana, et al, 2017). This means policy does not necessarily have to focus on supporting proof of concept or technology, but rather facilitating and catalysing replication.…”

Design of a solar district heating system with seasonal storage in Italy

“…However this technology could be extremely interesting for Italy since the solar resource is higher than in northern Europe. Many Italian cities already have district heating nets that are 75% fed by fossil fuels, with the remainder coming from waste and geothermal energy [31]. A prototype system was built in Cosenza in 1995 to provide space heating for a 1750 m 3 building [32].…”