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District Heating & Cooling Networks

What is DHS?

District Heating Systems (DHS) or Community heating Systems (CHS) involve the centralised production of and the distribution through insulated pipes of heat for residential and mixed-use developments. The primary network typically transports the heated water (90°C - 110°C) from the central boiler house to a substation located next to the customer residence. From this substation, the heat is transported to the end user e.g. radiator, fan coil unit, process load.

Dalkia manage over 650 DHS throughout Europe. In France alone, some 3 million people and numerous office/commercial premises are supplied with heat sourced from a Dalkia managed DHS across 3,000 km of network piping.

The benefits of a District Heating System are:

A safer environment for the customers: no boiler in the apartments/ retail
A more comfortable environment: assurance of an abundant and consistent heat supply
A peaceful living space: no boiler, no fuel, no odours, no noise
Facility maintained by a dedicated team of energy management engineers & technicians, guarantee of continuous supply and dedicated energy management
Proven track record in terms of reliability, efficiency and quality assurance
Space saving and individual flues not required
A greener environment: DHS can incorporate centralised biomass boilers, driving energy savings and allowing the developer / architect to meet any renewable obligations

Services that Dalkia can offer to developers/local councils wishing to install District Heating Systems include the following:

Farm Out Model:

The developer finances and hires a contractor to design and construct the district heating system or network. Once the network is commissioned, Dalkia will take sole responsibility for the operation and maintenance of the network and assume the efficiency risk. Dalkia will also manage the collection of fees from clients connected to the heating network and control fuel procurement for the network. In this model, the developer receives an annual revenue stream from Dalkia for each year of the contract - which is typically 25 years.

Concession Model:

This is similar to the Farm Out Model described above except for the fact that Dalkia finances the design and construction of the network and takes on all risk associated with the project.

Operation and Maintenance Only:

In this offer, Dalkia simply perform the operation and maintenance on the heating network and handle fuel deliveries if a biomass boiler is serving the network.

Dalkia can invest in the heat production and distribution equipment, thus reducing the initial capital cost for developers.

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