Roadmap to the Deployment of District Heating in Ireland

At global level, scientific measures and observations show that the planet averages temperature has been increasing by more than 1°C since pre-industrial times due to the emissions of greenhouse gases correlated to industrial and anthropic activities. The Paris Agreement and Agenda 2030 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) not only observe that the impacts of climate change will be felt by all, but also that these impacts will be perceived unevenly in different part of the world. As a signatory member to the Paris Agreement, Ireland acknowledges both the right and responsibility of all member countries to pursue a sustainable, low-carbon and climate-resilient development.
District heating systems can distribute heat from many different sources, including heat sources that are typically seen as a by-product and usually go to waste, like the exhaust heat from electricity production and industry. It is estimated that at European level there is enough exhaust heat now going to waste from electricity production and large energy users, like data centres, to meet all of Europe’s heating demands. At Irish level, it is estimated that Ireland has circa 30.5 TWh of excess heat available, the preponderance of which is from currently operating thermal power plants. The current quantity of Irish excess heat is above 6 times the total heat demand of Dublin City, that is in the region of 5 TWh.
Despite the European trend of growing district heating network, the uptake in Ireland is still poor.
District heating in Ireland in fact hand has been much slower to find its place in the heating market, and Ireland has one of the lowest shares of DH in Europe at less than 1%. Approximately 39% of Ireland’s total final consumption of energy is used to meet heat demands, and this heat is primarily supplied by individual oil and gas boiler systems, only approximately 7% is renewable heat in Ireland.
Replacing every individual fossil fuel-based heating system at national level on the Irish territory with a renewable solution is a very difficult task but using centralised high efficiency district heating networks in feasible locations could certainly contribute to the integration of high levels of low carbon energy sources in the heating sector.
In the present research, the main barriers to district heating development have been identified.
These barriers are essentially organisational rather than technological or financial. In Ireland, in fact, there is no tradition of district heating, consequently the lack of knowledge (across all sectors academia, public bodies, semi-state utility companies and customers) is one of the main barriers. Having identified the lack of knowledge as one of the main barriers for the development of district heating in Ireland, the present research would contribute to disseminate the potential of this technology in the academic sector.
A methodology to identify locations with high feasibility prospects for developing district heating networks has been proposed. The methodology is based on analyses run on the Irish Heat Atlas, which contains valuable information mainly about the heat demand as well as the heat supply on the Irish territory, and BER Map, which contains very detailed information on specific dwellings characteristics, including heating technologies. The methodology has been applied to two different showcases, an urban location and a rural location. The findings of the analyses run for both locations have been presented. The research results show that both selected locations are technically and economically feasible to be part of a sustainable sourced district heating network.
Recommendation for future work from the present research would be to correlate the information on heat demand, on heat supply as well as on dwelling heating technologies at a national level on the Irish territory.