It represents an increasingly common means by which building owners and developers can decarbonise new and existing stock. It is also a significant investment opportunity for real estate and specialist infrastructure investors such as pension funds looking for secure returns.

What is district heating?

We will increasingly see heat networks in our urban and suburban areas, replacing (mainly) the burning of gas for heating and hot water. They comprise underground flow and return pipes circulating hot water or steam to heat exchangers that will replace boilers and heat the water circulating to radiators and water heaters (the existing coils within hot water tanks).

In the UK, for several years the approach taken by government for this proven and well-known technology has been to provide funding assistance to local councils that wish to deploy heat networks. In tandem, planning permissions for energy from waste (EfW) plants have included conditions to enable retrofitting of a heat supply and for EfW plants to report on the progress they are making in utilising the energy. EfW is one of the heat sources of scale that successful networks in the UK – and many more in northern Europe – have used to supply district heating.

The pace of deployment required if the government is to meet the 20% provision means it has now legislated for heat zoning. In a designated heat zone, certain users of heat – large public buildings like hospitals and universities, and buildings or groups of buildings with existing shared heat systems such as flats with communal boilers – will be mandated to connect to a heat network. Likewise some heat producers including EfW plants, sewage works, power generators, industry and more recently data centres – can be mandated to supply it. 

Data centres – part of the cycle

Data centres are relatively new as producers of waste heat and offer another plentiful and constant source of energy for supplying district heating networks. Storing photos, video, emails, texts and other digital assets on “clouds” or elsewhere and relying on easy-to-use websites for increasing amounts of our daily life require massive consumption of electricity – in data centres – and much of this is lost as heat. Data centres spend huge sums on cooling their servers some of which could be recouped via the recycling of its excess heat.

We will become more like our continental cousins

Our Norwegian neighbours developed district heating at large scale decades ago because their approach to having huge natural gas resources was not to burn it for cheap energy but to sell it to others. That ship has sailed for the UK but developing district heating networks for ourselves is progress and data centres have their part to play.

Further information

Contact Rob Asquith