District Energy toolbox for municipal energy efficiency fast evaluation

The C2E2 provides expertise in district energy solutions to cities, as a means of unlocking the market of decarbonized energy systems. We support cities to connect district energy (district heating and/or cooling and/or domestic hot water) with waste heat resources and renewables to achieve greater sustainability. Our team supports cities in their short-/medium-/long- term of heating and cooling mapping and planning, local capacity building and in conducting pre-assessments and pre-feasibility studies. We are able to provide independent advice to cities in screening the most sustainable and cost-effective technical solutions with different scenarios to meet the demand of heating and cooling both for industrial purposes and residential comfort needs. The final objective is to reach the bankable district energy projects level and attracting finance with suitable business models.

Based on its own experience and international best practices the Centre has developed a district energy toolbox to disseminate and circulate success stories to engage other cities, countries or organisations that could be potential partners in replicating successful activities. The toolbox provides the following solutions with the aim to accelerate the energy efficiency at a municipality level:

  • Self-rapid assessment online tool of potential socio-economic benefits of district heating and cooling
  • Benefit analysis in GHG emission, savings of primary energy and O&M among different district heating and cooling solutions and their comparison with Business-As-Usual (BAU) systems
  • Data requirements to guide municipalities or end-users to collect data with default values adapted to specific countries
  • Guidelines for Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) for district energy projects
  • Contract templates and parameters to be included in the tender
  • Financial needs for investment under different types of business models
  • Payback years and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of different district energy solutions
  • Recommendations for Measure and Verification process
  • Creating partnerships and projects ready for implementation and replication
  • Dissemination material on best practices and study cases

The tool package contains excel-based tools for district heating and/or cooling in specific countries, templates in Word and PPT for rapid assessment reporting and presentation. It is recommended to be used to fast evaluate the socio-economic and technical potentials in the early stage of project development. The package can support policy makers and present results of different scenarios. The results can be used to initiate the most potential projects for deeper analysis of pre-feasibility or feasibility studies, business models etc.. Meanwhile, it can be directly linked to bench-marking building energy consumption tools or building energy consumption modelling results.

Share this

Sector: District energy

Country / Region: Global