Modeling assessments can provide useful support for simulating innovative and efficient plant and management hypotheses that valorize energy resources—renewables and waste heat—for district heating (DH). In fact, quantitative assessments serve as a support to industrial operators—often lacking in awareness—and policy makers.

The assessment of the demand for heat and share of district heating identified the Po Valley as a significant area for the evaluation of district heating plant revamping and implementation of new networks, given that the energy demand for heating in this area accounts for over 50% of the demand in Italy and 80% of the thermal energy delivered by district heating networks.

Locations in the Po Valley with energy demands greater than 20 GWh per year account for 55% of district heating energy in Italy and have an average density around 9 GWh/km2 per year and average energy of around 70 GWh. These parameters are related to the cost-effectiveness of the DH solution. The case studies we considered significant are characterized by energy technically available for district heating close to average energy for the revamping case study, and density equal to average density for the second case study concerning a location for which we assume a newly built plant.

The analysis of sustainable sources (waste heat, renewables, such as biomass, solar, geothermal) found in the area, cross-referenced with the demand for district heating, gave indicative proportions of energy coverage of individual potentially usable technologies powered by locally available sustainable and renewable sources in the Po Valley.

The first case study concerns the revamping of an existing 3rd generation network, which involved replacing gas-fired technologies with renewable technologies and lowering the operating temperatures (4th generation power plant). The second case study concerns a newly built power plant fueled only by renewables with comparison between two solutions: 4th vs 5th generation power plants, i.e. the scenario in which heat is distributed directly to the user vs the one in which ‘neighborhood’ substations are needed to raise the temperature of the heat distributed to the user. The two case studies, based on real locations, employed specific mixes of renewable sources.

A second strand of research pursues the creation of an Italian atlas of sites in which there is the possibility of heat recovery, for which assessments are made of the cost-effectiveness of building a connection to an existing DH network or developing a new one, using the algorithms developed in SERCAST. In particular, the work envisages the functional definition of the of the product, the definition of the methods for expanding the data to be acquired (demand, users, existing networks), and the development of algorithms for modeling the topology of the district heating network in each subcase