DISTRICT HEATING AND COOLING NETWORKS

Affordable clean energy - Sustainable cities and communities

For achieving the objectives

Agenda 2030

ENEA has developed innovative and efficient configurations for district heating and cooling networks that can integrate different energy sources, whether renewable or not, and recover excess waste energy. Such a system allows end users to become “prosumers”, i.e. they can exchange the excess heat they produce with the thermal network. ENEA also provides software applications to assess and maximize the performance of existing networks as well as to assess if building new networks is technically and economically feasible.

 

Benefits and advantages

  • Higher renewable energy self-consumption and possible recovery of excess heat;
  • lower energy consumption;
  • simpler thermal plants infrastructure of the building;
  • higher safety insofar as water is distributed within the building rather than gas or gpl;
  • lower environmental impact with respect to non-integrated solutions.

 

Figura 1: District heating network scheme

ENEA Service

  • Technology transfer
  • Consulting
  • Training

 

ENEA Activities

Programme Agreement between ENEA and the Italian Ministry for Economic Development on Electric System Research, 2019-21 Three-Year Plan

 

Keywords: energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, heat pump, photovoltaics, electric storage, thermal storage, nearly zero-energy

References

Energy Efficiency Unit Department

Contacts