District heating and cooling networks have been around in Europe for
more than a century. There are approximately
17,000 operational district heating systems that serve over 70 million people on the continent, with many originally having been developed to provide low-cost heating for residents, as well as energy independence.
Today, there is renewed interest in these systems, which some energy analysts call the “Swiss army knife” in the renewable energy toolkit. They can utilise and disperse energy from a variety of sources, from waste industrial heat arising from sewage and data centres, to heat-pump derived energy that comes from air, ground or nearby waterways. District heat networks can also make use of energy from deep geothermal, biomass, biogas and solar thermal.