EnEff:Wärme: ENA – Energy Planning to Enable Waste Heat Use in District Heating

© U.J.Alexander Staedtischer Bauhof / AdobeStock.com

In order to achieve the climate protection goals by 2050, it is necessary to almost completely eliminate the greenhouse gas emissions from the heat supply of the building stock. This will be made possible on the one hand by a significant reduction in absolute energy consumption, primarily driven by improved thermal insulation, and on the other hand by the ongoing development of renewable energies and waste heat. Heating network systems have an essential systemic function in this context, because they connect low GHG heat sources with heat consumers.

Within the framework of the NENIA project (duration 08/2015 - 07/2018), which has been investigating the grid-bound use of industrial waste heat for the heat supply of buildings, significant technical-economically usable potentials of about 20 TWh per year have been identified for Germany. Practical case studies, surveys and stakeholder workshops made it clear that a locally coordinated, integrated energy management planning process is an important lever for activating the potentials in practice. The systematic preparation and analysis of high-resolution local data on waste heat sources, energy infrastructures and heat demand structure is indispensable. Furthermore, it is important to permanently involve relevant actors from industry (potential waste heat suppliers), energy supply companies (potential heat consumers/network operators) and from cities and municipalities (urban planning, municipal climate protection).

Based on the results of the NENIA-Project, the ENA research association, which is led by ifeu and includes GEF Ingenieur AG, indevo GmbH and partners from industry, energy supply and local government, is developing holistic, innovative heat supply concepts for two model districts in Krefeld and Osnabrück. Here the focus is on the grid-bound use of industrial waste heat. In process-accompanying working meetings, interviews with experts and discussion/information sessions, the main aim is to formulate actor-specific requirements for successful energy master planning. In addition, it will be discussed how innovation-driven detailed concepts of grid-bound waste heat utilisation can be developed for a possible subsequent implementation. The NENIA project also brings together detailed planning-relevant data in a GIS-based working platform, simulates scenarios of heat source/heat sink development, calculates costs and ecological effects and derives general requirements for the data basis and data model. The results will be distributed in the form of actor-specific guidelines, conference papers and articles.