Further investigations on the Effective Width for district heating systems

Abstract District Heating is a cornerstone for the decarbonisation of the heating and cooling sector in Europe. Nonetheless, this technology is currently absent in a majority of the continent’s urban areas, and hence the need for appropriate methods by which to estimate the cost, as well as underlying cost parameters, to assess the feasibility of developing district heating networks is of general interest. One key underlying cost parameter, the concept of Effective Width, which is the ratio between a land area and the trench length within that land area, is the focus quantity of this work. Effective Width enables a first order assessment of the total route length of pipes in a given urban area and, together with the average diameter of the pipes, allows an estimation of the investment cost of installing district heating pipes. However, initial implementations of the Effective Width have been based on rather limited empirical evidence, such as a small set of cases and often disregarding service pipes due to lack of data. Another shortcoming of previous studies is the extrapolation of established relations into more sparsely populated areas. By assembly of a richer database, which contains building data, heat consumption data in the supplied areas, as well as actual network information (numerical and geographical), provided by several district heating companies in Denmark and Sweden, the objectives of this study are twofold: first, to improve the general understanding of Effective Width and its relation to building density, and secondly, to study the particular case of sparse areas. The results of this study provide new insight to enhance our understanding of the Effective Width concept which may facilitate better assessments of future district heating systems.