AUTHOR=Brocklebank Ian , Beck Stephen B. M. , Styring Peter 

TITLE=A Simple Approach to Modeling Rural and Urban District Heating

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Energy Research

VOLUME=Volume 6 - 2018

YEAR=2018

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2018.00103

DOI=10.3389/fenrg.2018.00103

ISSN=2296-598X

ABSTRACT=There has been considerable research effort aimed at decarbonising the power sector. However, if the UK wishes to decarbonise its heat supply, it needs to encourage wide scale implementation of district heating. Currently, district heating implementation is low, accounting for only 2% of the country's heat supply. This low implementation is mainly due to the high network installation costs, particularly in rural areas with low heat demand density. The current academic models of district heating are complicated, time consuming and require primary network data. This work has developed a simple model that could quickly and easily assess the economic and environmental feasibility of any new district heating network. The model has been developed so that it is simple enough for a non-engineering member of staff at a local authority to use. In this way it differs from other models as it allows fast and direct assessment of the feasibility of possible new district heating networks in their locale. In this paper, the heat demand modelling is considered. As a number of assumptions are made in the work, Monte Carlo simulations are used to assess the model accuracy, resulting in changes being made to the data collection steps. The results of the Monte Carlo simulations necessitated changes to be made to the data collection process in the modelling work. The model was used to highlight some of the differences between rural and urban district heating, assessing if the same model could be used in both scenarios. The work showed a number of differences between the two models. The rural case studies focused primarily on domestic customers, requiring a change in the data collection process to exclude these customers in future work. The rural case studies had significantly longer pipe networks which affect the techno-economic modelling work.