Digitalization of District Heating

Operating district heating network using additional data with the traditional data extracted from the SCADA system at the production is discussed. The benefits of including new data in daily operation for the utility is demonstrated. For the past decade, more and more data is becoming available for district heating utilities with the smart meters being installed in every home connected to the district heating network.

More local climate stations inside the city are also being installed, and made accessible for everyone. In this report, data from smart meters are presented and how they can be used to operate the network more efficiently. Also, weather forecast in cities is discussed and how they can be improved by localizing them to the local climate using climate stations.

The case study in this report is a on-line operation of temperature control in Tingbjerg which is a small area that is operated by HOFOR. HOFOR is a utility company in Copenhagen which handles for example the district heating, and waste water. They also produce energy for the Copenhagen area. The case study demonstrate how to localize heat demand forecast and operate closed-loop temperature control for a small area.

The result for the operation is compared to the previous operation where it was done using open-loop temperature control, i.e. no feedback of the system. The report emphasizes how current state-of-the-art methods can be improved by using newly available data (e.g. smart meters as feedback of the network) and thereby enhancing the efficiency of the operation.