r/Glasgow Tools

Title
Author	meepmeep13
Comment	I was resisting replying on the basis I'd end up writing far too much, but I'm twitching too hard based on the other responses here. The history of district heating in the UK is complex; it has happened at various times (we are currently on the 3rd major tranche of it being used, with previous rounds in the 50s and 70s), but really the key factor is to reverse the question- why would you expect us to be like the Scandinavian countries when our energy economies are completely different? We have different resources, costs of extraction, building stock, extant networks etc etc While what /u/arcade_advice says about use of waste heat is almost-correct on a purely energetic level, it ignores that you have to get the heat from the source into homes. And thanks to the Edwardians, we already had town gas supplying homes for heat, cooking and lighting, with an existing network that we could plug North Sea gas straight into. So on economics, replacing all that infrastructure with heat networks doesn't really make economic sense compared to just reusing the existing network and having home boilers. The only other country that had such significant access to North Sea gas at the same was Norway, and the Norway of 1960 was a very different country to the UK of 1960 in terms of infrastructure - they were basically building a new economy from scratch so had energy infrastructure and house building going on at the same time, making it a lot more cost-effective to combine both. The Netherlands is really the only country that is comparable to the UK in terms of resources, and they have followed pretty much the same path as us. There's also a lot of geology to deal with (you have to get large pipes and thermal stores into the ground) and local housing stock profiles (retrofitting heat networks is prohibitively difficult and expensive) so the economic benefits of heat networks are highly locational, and again have to compare against the base case of methane + individual domestic boilers being a very economic solution. The other major consideration when comparing to Scandinavian countries is the geopolitics and how different countries responded, in particular, to the oil shocks of the early 1970s. The Scandinavian response was generally to empower local municipalities to take over energy issues and to cover off issues around energy security and socialisation (as obviously the colder the country the greater the desire to socialise access to heat for maximum welfare), leading to joint planning of energy and social housing stock. (and incidentally this is also why the first commercial-scale wind power was developed, in order to diversify away from oil) In the UK we basically took to massive investment in North Sea infrastructure rather than localising the issue. Anyway, this all gets turned on its head in the context of carbon emissions, where burning methane in your home is no longer the counterfactual, and heat networks can be a key tech in urbanised areas, but note that the vast, vast majority of networks in the UK and Scandinavia are not low carbon at all. They could be, but most of them are just burning the same gas as you would at home, and often with greater efficiency losses due to the amount of pipework involved.
Reddit Link	https://www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/comments/nuwt98/the_steamie_tuesday_8_june_2021/h126fma/
Created	Tue 8th Jun 2021 7:43pm
Status	normal ()

I was resisting replying on the basis I'd end up writing far too much, but I'm twitching too hard based on the other responses here.

The history of district heating in the UK is complex; it has happened at various times (we are currently on the 3rd major tranche of it being used, with previous rounds in the 50s and 70s), but really the key factor is to reverse the question- why would you expect us to be like the Scandinavian countries when our energy economies are completely different? We have different resources, costs of extraction, building stock, extant networks etc etc

While what /u/arcade_advice says about use of waste heat is almost-correct on a purely energetic level, it ignores that you have to get the heat from the source into homes. And thanks to the Edwardians, we already had town gas supplying homes for heat, cooking and lighting, with an existing network that we could plug North Sea gas straight into. So on economics, replacing all that infrastructure with heat networks doesn't really make economic sense compared to just reusing the existing network and having home boilers. The only other country that had such significant access to North Sea gas at the same was Norway, and the Norway of 1960 was a very different country to the UK of 1960 in terms of infrastructure - they were basically building a new economy from scratch so had energy infrastructure and house building going on at the same time, making it a lot more cost-effective to combine both. The Netherlands is really the only country that is comparable to the UK in terms of resources, and they have followed pretty much the same path as us.

There's also a lot of geology to deal with (you have to get large pipes and thermal stores into the ground) and local housing stock profiles (retrofitting heat networks is prohibitively difficult and expensive) so the economic benefits of heat networks are highly locational, and again have to compare against the base case of methane + individual domestic boilers being a very economic solution.

The other major consideration when comparing to Scandinavian countries is the geopolitics and how different countries responded, in particular, to the oil shocks of the early 1970s. The Scandinavian response was generally to empower local municipalities to take over energy issues and to cover off issues around energy security and socialisation (as obviously the colder the country the greater the desire to socialise access to heat for maximum welfare), leading to joint planning of energy and social housing stock. (and incidentally this is also why the first commercial-scale wind power was developed, in order to diversify away from oil) In the UK we basically took to massive investment in North Sea infrastructure rather than localising the issue.

Anyway, this all gets turned on its head in the context of carbon emissions, where burning methane in your home is no longer the counterfactual, and heat networks can be a key tech in urbanised areas, but note that the vast, vast majority of networks in the UK and Scandinavia are *not* low carbon at all. They *could* be, but most of them are just burning the same gas as you would at home, and often with greater efficiency losses due to the amount of pipework involved.