Local district heating and cooling (i.e. thermal) networks can help deliver on all the EU overarching energy objectives and targets – contributing towards carbon reduction targets, renewable energy targets and goals of energy affordability and security. Local municipal authorities have an important role in this respect since they are largely responsible for identifying, planning and making new networks happen. It is therefore important to develop tools with sufficient local detail to be meaningful and effective – and to ensure they are user friendly and easy to deploy at a local (e.g. municipality) level where internal resources are often limited.
THERMOS (Thermal Energy Resource Modelling and Optimisation System) aims to address this need by developing the methods, data, and tools to enable public authorities and other stakeholders to undertake more sophisticated thermal energy system planning far more rapidly and cheaply than they can today. This will amplify and accelerate the development of new low carbon heating and cooling systems across Europe, and enable faster upgrade, refurbishment and expansion of existing systems. This approach will reduce planning costs, speeding up the lengthy processes currently associated with building and upgrading thermal networks. It will also allow national and regional planning to be based upon the same high-resolution energy system data as local project development processes.
THERMOS has been developed in collaboration with four ‘Pilot City’ local authorities (Granollers, London Borough of Islington, Jelgava and Warsaw) and four additional ‘Replication City’ authorities (Greater London Authority, Berlin, Alba Iulia and Cascais) to ensure the outputs are robust, validated and fit for purpose. UK partner Centre for Sustainable Energy coordinated the project with support from Spanish partner Creara. Additional technical or general support was provided by Aalborg University, the German Energy Agency (Dena), the Polish National Energy Conservation Agency (KAPE), the Latvian Environmental Investment Fund (LEIF) and Imperial College, London. A project Advisory Board was also convened comprising four experts from the decentralised energy and district heating sector.
