Financing district heating - methods used in the FinDH project

In this special episode of Energy Policycast, we give a taste of the methods used in the FinDH project - an IEA DHC Annex XIV-supported research project focused on financing of district heating projects.    Professor Urban Persson/Halmstad University, Dr. Luis Sanchez-Garcia/now Hofor, Drs. Kenneth Karlsson and Kristoffer Andersen/Energy Modelling Lab, and model expert Till Ben Brahim discuss methods with project leader Daniel Sneum.    FinDH publications One-page summary Summary report for non-technical audiences Access the full report through IEA DHC    

In this special episode of Energy Policycast, we give a taste of the results of the FinDH project - an IEA DHC Annex XIV-supported research project focused on financing of district heating projects.    Professors Kristina Lygnerud/Lund University and Tobias Popovic/HFT Stuttgart discuss the project results with project leader Daniel Sneum.    FinDH publications One-page summary Summary report for non-technical audiences Access the full report through IEA DHC

Energy Policycast's new season explores financing of district heating in the FinDH project.  Subscribe here to follow the results being published in 2025. The IEA DHC-supported project brings together researchers and experts from Energy Modelling Lab/Denmark, Euroheat & Power/Belgium, Halmstad University/Sweden, Lund University/Sweden and Steinbeis Transfer Center Sustainable Finance and Management/Germany. IEA DHC: https://www.iea-dhc.org/the-research/annexes/annex-xiv/annex-xiv-project-03 Project website: https://www.euroheat.org/dhc/eu-projects/findh Project lead: Daniel Møller Sneum/Energy Modelling Lab and Lund University [email protected] LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8167401/ The podcasts and contents presented here are not official IEA DHC communication, but solely the responsibility of the project partners behind the FinDH project, based in the desire to share results. 

“Anything that exists is possible” as Boulding’s first law prescribes. I was wondering why, in some places of the world, district energy systems were very flexibly integrated with the electricity system – while in other parts, they were not. So I set out to explore the existence of flexible sector coupling. This resulted in the study that is the focus of today’s episode. Anyone working with sector coupling and flexibility may benefit from listening in – if they can bear a 30-minute talk by me. Or else, dig directly into the resources referenced below. --- Scientific paper - Barriers to flexibility in the district energy-electricity system interface – A taxonomy Policy brief – Barriers to flexibility Interactive version – Play around at your own pace --- The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder is highly recommendable, and has recently hosted an episode with me as a guest (the upside is TWO middle-aged men chatting, instead of just ONE in this episode…). So give it a listen as well! The FlexSUS project has received funding in the framework of the joint programming initiative ERA-Net Smart Energy Systems’ focus initiative Integrated, Regional Energy Systems, with support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 775970. Sound design by Dea Cisar. Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome @DistrictEnergyD. Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

A world premiere for your ears! Nordic Clean Energy Scenarios by Nordic Energy Research is the most comprehensive study of decarbonisation of the Nordics so far – out 7 September 2021. Energy Policycast is lucky enough to host two of the main authors, Klaus Skytte (CEO, Nordic Energy Research) and Kenneth Karlsson (CEO, Energy Modelling Lab and Senior Project Manager, Swedish Research Institute). The study explores solution tracks to carbon neutral Nordics through 2030 and onwards to 2050. These tracks include electrification, power-to-X, bioenergy, carbon capture technologies in combination with bioenergy and behavioural change. See the full study here: Nordic Clean Energy Scenarios In the Peer Review section, Klaus recommends the study Renewable energy in the Nordics – state of the art of renewable targets in the Nordics and the Nordic Talks podcast. Additionally, The Nordic Energy Challenge 2021 is coming up in September 2021.   Sound design by Dea Cisar. Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome. Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Our music and jingles are based in energy technologies - see for yourself in this short clip. Best wishes for the summer! Sound design by Dea Cisar. Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome. Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

How does the beauty of the landscape, i.e. scenicness, play into the deployment of wind power? And how can we measure scenicness? Those questions are addressed by Professor Russell McKenna and his co-authors in the study Quantifying the trade-off between cost-efficiency and public acceptance for onshore wind (working paper) and journal paper Scenicness assessment of onshore wind sites with geotagged photographs and impacts on approval and cost-efficiency. Inspired by the Economist article Computer analysis of what is scenic may help town planners, the researchers applied the scenicness dataset ScenicOrNot to evaluate wind deployment in landscapes.   During the interview, we discuss Pablo Hevia-Koch's PhD thesis on acceptance costs. The Peer Review section discusses the study How much wind power potential does Europe have? Examining European wind power potential with an enhanced socio-technical atlas. And the comment to this from McKenna et al.: On the socio-technical potential for onshore wind in Europe: A response to Enevoldsen et al.  Also, the response by Enevoldsen et al.    The study was authored by Russell McKenna of University of Aberdeen, previously Technical University of Denmark. Jann Weinand of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Ismir Mulalić of Copenhagen Business School, Stefan Petrović of Danish Energy Agency, previously Technical University of Denmark, Kai Mainzer of greenventory, and Tobias Preis and Helen Susannah Moat, both of Warwick Business School and The Alan Turing Institute.

What happens when old wind projects are replaced with new capacity? Associate professor Lena Kitzing from DTU Wind Energy discuss her recent study - Multifaceted drivers for onshore wind energy repowering and their implications for energy transition - showing previously unknown aspects of repowering. Also worth reading is the affiliated policy brief Multifaceted political and social drivers inform wind energy repowering decisions and potential. The study was inspired by discussions in IEA's Task 26 on wind and co-authored by Morten Kofoed Jensen/Aegir Insights, Thomas Telsnig/JRC and Eric Lantz/NREL.   In the Peer Review section, we discuss The 7 habits of Highly Effective People.  Sound design by Dea Cisar. Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome. Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

What should we do with waste - dump it nationally or ship across borders to burn? Does it make sense economically - and how about climate? This rare and very interesting topic is discussed by PhD Amalia Alonzo and Professor Marie Münster, based in their two studies The climate footprint of imports of combustible waste in systems with high shares of district heating and variable renewable energy and The economic value of imports of combustible waste in systems with high shares of district heating and variable renewable energy. The studies were co-authored with Ciprian Cimpan, Maria Ljunggren Söderman and Hans V. Ravn as part of the TOPWASTE project.  In the Peer Review section, Marie recommends Harry van der Weijde/University of Edinburgh's webinars on energy and Dartmouth College's: Energy seminar series. Sound design by Dea Cisar. Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome. Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

How will various degrees of deployment of data centres impact a small country’s energy system? In this 2020-interview, Stefan Petrovic, now special advisor at the Danish Energy Agency, explains a very interesting study on Denmark by Stefan Petrović, Alessandro Colangelo, Olexandr Balyk, Chiara Delmastro, Maurizio Gargiulo, Mikkel Bosack Simonsen and Kenneth Bernard Karlsson. And he has some unusual - but useful - recommendations in the Peer Review-section of the episode... The study: The role of data centres in the future Danish energy system Study on scenicness: The implications of landscape visual impact on future highly renewable power systems: a case study for Great Britain The offshore-onshore conundrum: Preferences for wind energy considering spatial data in Denmark Fabian Bühler’s papers Industrial excess heat for district heating in Denmark Spatiotemporal and economic analysis of industrial excess heat as a resource for district heating Also, here's a link to a 2020-episode of The Interchange, which had an interesting discussion on data centres Sound design by Dea Cisar. Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome. Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!