Prospect
Summary
District heating, also known as a heat network, similarly combines hot water pipes and a heat source, but instead of serving just one house it heats an entire neighbourhood. The pipes run underground, much as existing gas or water networks do, and connect to individual buildings.
Such systems can deliver the same heat for “about 60 per cent of the total electricity demand than if everybody had their own heat pump,” Channa Karunaratne, district energy market sector lead at engineering firm AECOM, tells me. Even better, they can work with “waste heat” from industrial sources, like water treatment works or data centres. AECOM research finds that London’s data centres alone release enough waste heat for half a million homes. A network able to use this recovered heat would be 600 to 800 per cent efficient, says Karunaratne. Amazingly, such waste sources can easily reach temperatures of 80C, he says.
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