What's the problem Tony?

District heating is a service provider no different than say natural gas.

Where a network is installed most houses will want to have it, but some will not.

The system is maintained by the service provider, the consumer just pays for metered usage. What's your issue with repair costs?

District heating really comes into it's own where there is a cheap source of heat locally such as waste heat from industry and the cost is really just infrastructure, maintenance, distribution and administration.

I am sure that there are vast numbers of homes which can be heated from industrial waste heat in the UK.

In most cases it is a win, win, win for consumers, industry and the environment.

Been working fine in Wick (Caithness) for quite a while - decades I think, maybe more. AIUI it was originally waste heat from the distillery (Old Pulteney) but was then separated off and supplies heat to the distillery and the homes around it.

Ed, You got any data of the cost and efficiency of that Wick project?
Ed, I wonder why they use biomass and gas, they could have used a WSHP.

Sorry, Steamy, no idea - it seems like it's had a rather mixed past politically but is making sense financially now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-34767526

£57,500/house before the usage bill comes in.

I think that may answer Tony's question.

I think another problem with them is that they work best where there is a source of waste/nuisance thermal energy nearby. So pumping thermal energy out of the Tube and into houses above is a neat solution.
But that is a unique case in the UK.
Not many large thermal businesses have a housing nearby (there may be a few, but generally they are kept away).
We don't have that many thermal business anyway these days, and if they were to close (like a steel works), then the infrastructure and investment is wasted.
And to add to that, we have had a policy of putting houses on the gas grid, which is pretty efficient in both transport and local combustion these days. I am not keen on combustion technology, but gas is what it is, about the best we have.

Eventually, we will be 'all electric', as that is probably the cheapest transmission and RE generation technology, so hardly worth investing in a different technology infrastructure.
They would have been much better using that £11.5m to build some wind turbines and solar farms. Or buy every house two Hybrid cars (I assume that anywhere in Caithness is a high mileage area).
And I think the £11.5m is just what the council spent, so could have been double that.

"Build to Rent" is coming to a city near you!"

Think of 500 homes, all owned by the same pension fund and rented out, being managed by a on site rental agent, with repair people etc on site. Then tell me that heat networks will not work for them.

As the builders are being funded by the pension funds over the next 10 years (or so) with a study demand, building factories to make the homes off site etc and getting great quality also becomes a real option.

http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=7841

Same discussion as before?

Oops, crossed with Mike U N

Posted By: WillInAberdeenCurrently around 1,000 tonnes of wood chips are used per annum, saving 600 tonnes of CO2e emissions compared with natural gas.

Sound a bit optimistic, they must be replanting at a fantastic rate, thousands of acres a year.

Next time Tony asks for a bit more food I hope somebody just turns his plate round saying “look, there's more on the left side of your plate, now“ or whatever.

Surely the point about burning wood is that the carbon cycle is 100 years or less as opposed to millions for fossil fuels. burning woos can be carbon neutral if you look at the 100 year time scale. Of course that argument falls apart some what when you then use fossil fuels to transport the wood (products) half way across the world or even halfway across the country. And of course you have to plant at least as many trees as you burn.

Could burning fossil fuels also be termed carbon neutral if you planted the equivalent number of trees to the amount of oil or gas burnt?

AIUI the Aberdeen council scheme is successful because its partly based on CHP so more efficient than direct gas heating. It serves a mix of homes and public buildings which need heat at different times of the day and of the year, improving the overall run time of the CHP. The housing is mostly tower blocks or sheltered housing complexes which are close together and easy to link up.

They mentioned here connecting 740 flats for £4.2m which is £6k each. http://www.aberdeenheatandpower.co.uk/seaton-energy-centre/

The Banchory scheme was built into a new housing development instead of laying gas mains. The developer is a local landowner with a lot of forestry so the fuel is very local. Apparently the heat is sold about 3p/kWh. They are also growing short rotation willow and looking into geothermal from the granite. There is a lot of maturing commercial forestry in this area, which was planted for the paper industry which has since closed down.

I have no connection or insight in these schemes, other than living in the same county, this info is just local talk.

Posted By: djhBut really, if anybody wants to take this discussion further then it ought to be somewhere other than in Mikeee's thread!

Oh there is, there is.
http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=6241&page=1

Will take you most of tomorrow.

Given that a) it was the OP of the thread who took it off-topic to the extent that it is off-topic and b) the COâ‚‚ neutrality of district heating is fairly relevant to the original post I don't see it as a much of a swerve.