Amsterdam City explores the spatial impact of a district heating network for the city
The Netherlands has a goal to reduce carbon emissions by 95% by 2050. Amsterdam City took the opportunity to run some in-depth spatial explorative studies into the spatial impact of a largescale district heating network in their urban centre with the goal to improve cooperation and ameliorate spatial planning of district heating networks.
The Challenge Amsterdam City Faced
The Aardgasvrij initiative sparked Amsterdam City’s need to start an explorative study into the spatial impact of the future district heating network. The city of Amsterdam has a strong planning tradition and they are committed to reducing the carbon footprint in a dense urban environment The city already has already got two large scale district heating network, however the majority of the city is powered by natural gas.
The (2020) transitievise warmte found that district heating is the preferred technology for socioeconomic reasons ‘In a high-density city urban environments district heating is a viable option, and it requires space both above and underground,’ said Tim Ruijs, Urban Planner and Designer with Amsterdam City.
‘Amsterdam City is partial owner of a district heating company but it doesn’t build networks and heat sources themselves. Various commercial entities are active in making the city more Aardgasvrij. The municipality is responsible for the spatial quality of the city. With this exploration we hope better deal with spatial scarcity above and underground, coordinate construction work better and improve cooperation between utility companies who all work in our public space ,’ said Ruijs.
The Amsterdam City team had a dilemma, they were been asked about the future of district heating in Amsterdam, but without a tool that could plan and give ballpark figures, it was impossible to answer this question. ‘The Amsterdam district heating network need to triple in size. A huge undertaking. We wanted a tool that could explore various scenarios and compare impact of those strategic decisions. And above all could provide an perspective of the future layout of the district heating network for the whole city,’ said Ruijs.
“We’re researchers – we know a lot about the problems in Amsterdam such as spatial availability above and below ground, and we wanted to use this knowledge with a tool. We were looking for an integrated approach,’ said Ruijs.
Approach
Having used Comsof Heat in a previous project, the team knew that Comsof Heat could deliver the insights they needed.
“We used it Comsof Heat on an earlier project, which was smaller than this one. We also received a lot of help getting on our feet with the software from the team at Rotterdam City, who are also using Comsof Heat,” said Ruijs. The team noted there is a learning curve, however if you are familiar with GIS systems and district heating in general it isn’t too steep.
“It is easy to retrace functions and input parameters. We did various tests, on detailed level on a neighborhood. We discovered we had to make plans on neighborhood clusters of 50-60k houses, which is where it became functioning for us and keep complexity low,” said Felix Behrends, Energy Transition Engineer at Amsterdam City.
“The Comsof team answered questions quickly and they made improvements based on our questions. The team is very responsive.’ Tim Ruijs, Urban Planner and Designer with Amsterdam City
Results
The Amsterdam City team are happy with the results Comsof Heat has delivered to them.
“We made loads of scenarios and experimented with various runs we would like to test in Amsterdam. We are incredibly happy with the results we have,” said Behrends. The exploration conducted using Comsof Heat increased the team’s knowledge about the possibilities of district heating in Amsterdam.
“We had a very technical result it gave lots of interesting input. For example, we might need 900-1.300 garage sized locations in existing neighborhoods for district heating equipment, or 2.100 km piping through existing streets, or 1.000 km streets need to be opened. What is clear from the exploration, is the correlation between spatial impact, investment cost and energy performance, the scope of the problem is now clearer,’ said Ruijs.
These results also help the city to co-ordinate with other external stakeholders, to better incorporate the development of energy systems with more traditional city planning and maintenance.
“Now we can take it to the next phase, how do we work together, how do we plan, what interactions do we need to have to make these district heating plans a reality in the future,” said Ruijs.
