Heat map

The spatial component plays an important role in the evaluation of heat supply options in existing buildings. Central research questions on the long-term technical and economic potential of heating network infrastructures, near-surface or deep geothermal energy, large-scale solar thermal energy, industrial and commercial waste heat or the system-friendly installation of thermal storage can only be answered by comparing the long-term heat consumption development in the building stock and the local heat sources with high spatial and temporal resolution.

To this end, ifeu is working with Geomer GmbH and GEF Ingenieur AG to develop and maintain the Heat Atlas, a bottom-up model of all residential and non-residential buildings in the Federal Republic of Germany that are classified and located in terms of energy consumption.

The heat atlas combines information on the geometry of individual buildings from the 3D building models of the state surveying offices, utilisation information from the official property information system, small-scale data on the age structure of buildings from the building and housing census and location-specific climate data from the German Weather Service and links this with the heat consumption calculation in the GEMOD building model.

The heat atlas makes the results of long-term refurbishment scenarios from GEMOD available for spatial analyses. This allows the interactions between different refurbishment strategies and localised heat source potentials to be mapped and spatially differentiated development strategies to be derived.

The current model results on building-specific heat requirements in the German residential and non-residential building stock can also be licensed by third parties via geomer GmbH in the form of the "Wärmeatlas Deutschland 23.0" geodata product. A detailed model description can be found here. Information on the geodata product "Wärmeatlas 2.0" can be found here.

For the development of heating network concepts for larger, contiguous building stocks, estimates of the peak load for network dimensioning and, in addition, at least hourly load profiles of the heat demand are required in order to develop a generator utilisation concept. The "Load profiles" plug-in developed by ifeu for the free GIS software QGIS enables the rapid creation of this data basis based on annual demand or consumption data of variably selectable building stocks in the GIS. The tool is customised to the data schema of Wärmeatlas Deutschland 3.0 and offers numerous setting options. The results are displayed as an interactive graphic in the web browser and exported in parallel as an Excel file. The installation files and a detailed description are linked below.

Description of model "heat atlas"3.0 (in German) 

Description QGIS-Plugin "Lastprofile" (in German) 

Installation files QGIS-Plugin „Lastprofile“ (53 MB)

© ifeu Institut für Energie- und Umweltforschung gGmbH Heidelberg, 2024

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