<p>District heating through the Swedish model has proven to be an environmental and financially beneficial solution for heating. By reusing energy resources that normally would be wasted con-tributes district heating in an effective way to the society’s energy consumption. Today district heating stands for more than fifty percent of the heat supply to the Swedish residential and service sector buildings. The long tradition in the area has generated knowledge and experiences that to-day are applicable to other countries that are looking for more environmental conscious heating alternatives.</p><p>The goal and purpose with this thesis has been to use the Swedish knowledge gained in district heating and apply them in United Kingdom, where district heating currently comprise a low pro-portion of the total energy supply. Through an analytical method, the effective width (ground area/trench length) has been calculated for several city districts in Halmstad and Göteborg. This material has been used to decide the distribution costs depending on different charicaristic num-bers and by so the capital cost for district heat distribution has been estimated for some selected city districts in Slough, United Kingdom.</p><p>The result indicates that the effective width can be constant, although this cannot be verified due to possible noice in the data. The capital cost for Slough has shown being slightly higher than the estimated capital cost in the Swedish city districts. During the work of this thesis, differences in the residential living structure in respective country have been identified, which can be a contrib-uting explaination to the higher capital cost in Slough. Though the results still supports the in-crease in usage of district heating in United Kingdom, if low cost heat is available.</p>

District heating through the Swedish model has proven to be an environmental and financially beneficial solution for heating. By reusing energy resources that normally would be wasted con-tributes district heating in an effective way to the society’s energy consumption. Today district heating stands for more than fifty percent of the heat supply to the Swedish residential and service sector buildings. The long tradition in the area has generated knowledge and experiences that to-day are applicable to other countries that are looking for more environmental conscious heating alternatives. The goal and purpose with this thesis has been to use the Swedish knowledge gained in district heating and apply them in United Kingdom, where district heating currently comprise a low pro-portion of the total energy supply. Through an analytical method, the effective width (ground area/trench length) has been calculated for several city districts in Halmstad and Göteborg. This material has been used to decide the distribution costs depending on different charicaristic num-bers and by so the capital cost for district heat distribution has been estimated for some selected city districts in Slough, United Kingdom. The result indicates that the effective width can be constant, although this cannot be verified due to possible noice in the data. The capital cost for Slough has shown being slightly higher than the estimated capital cost in the Swedish city districts. During the work of this thesis, differences in the residential living structure in respective country have been identified, which can be a contrib-uting explaination to the higher capital cost in Slough. Though the results still supports the in-crease in usage of district heating in United Kingdom, if low cost heat is available.

Due to the environment degradation and threats of the climate change, how to develop the technologies to use renewable energy and improve current energy systems to meet the increasing demand of human activities instead of using fossil fuels are amongst hot issues that being discussed nowadays. Due to the specific weather condition, district heating, which contains space heating and domestic hot water, is needed in Sweden. Solar energy is the most potential and environmental friendly energy resource. It can be utilized in many different aspects. The profitability of building solar heating plant for producing heat to supply the district heating in Sweden was discussed in the thesis. In order to achieve the result, central solar heating plant and solar combisystem were discussed. Information was collected from “Sciencedirect”, some related companies and institutions websites, and etc. Very few solar radiations are available during winter in Sweden, while the demands of district heating are the highest. During summer time, a lot of cities in Sweden can use the industrial waste heat to cover the district heating load, and in some cities where there is no industrial waste heat can operate biomass combined heat and power (CHP) plant to cover the heating load. Combined solar-biomass heating plant could improve the efficiency of biomass heating plant and reduce the unnecessary heat losses. Solar combisystem has a relatively high cost and complex system. The system which is able to supply some hot water for washing machine may have a good future, due to the possibility that the price of electricity in Sweden increases. Large-scale solar heating plants are less attractive in Sweden due to the existence of industrial waste heat and CHP plant that supplied by biomass. Combined solar-biomass heating plant would be a good system to build if there is no available industrial waste heat and biomass heating plant is used to supply the district heating. Due to the current electrical price and the cost of combisystem, it is not that attractive to build this system. In the coming future, if the transportation cost and the price of biomass itself become too high to make the CHP plant no longer cost effective, and the price of the electricity become high, the solar energy will make more contribution to the district heating in the coming future.

The concept of exergy is defined and applied to district heating systems. The influence from different reference state conditions and system boundaries are explained in some detail. The aim is to show the simplicity and value of using the concept of exergy when analyzing district heating processes. The exergy factor is introduced and applied for a number of Swedish and Danish district heating systems. This varies from 14.2% to 22.5% for Swedish district heating systems. The higher the exergy factor, the more the exergy losses in the passive conversion towards space heating. Large losses revealed in an exergy treatment of a process should be seen as a challenge to achieve technical improvements of the system.

Thesis (Master)--İzmir Institute of Technology, İzmir, 2005. / Keywords: Geothermal energy, geothermal fields, district heating, feasibility, conceptual planning. Includes bibliographical references (leaves.70-72).

Thesis (Master)--İzmir Institute of Techn / Includes bibliographical references (leaves. 46-47).

Thesis(Master)--İzmir Institute of Technology,İzmir, 2004 / Includes bibliographical references (leaves. 58).

<p>The purpose of this investigation is to further the current discussion of how the Swedish market for district heating can be made more competitive and effective. This is done by investigating how price, costs of production and profitability of district heating varies with ownership, a variable frequently held accountable for financial performance variations in natural monopoly markets. The investigation is based on financial and technical performance data from 203 firms from 2007 and 2008, compiled by the Swedish Energy Market Inspectorate. The results strongly indicate that private firms are more profitable than firms owned, fully or partly, by local government. Furthermore, the results find that higher profitability tends to be positively correlated with prices, rather than negatively with costs of production. The results speak in favor of private ownership under regulation, rather than the current mixture of public and unregulated private ownership.</p>

The purpose of this investigation is to further the current discussion of how the Swedish market for district heating can be made more competitive and effective. This is done by investigating how price, costs of production and profitability of district heating varies with ownership, a variable frequently held accountable for financial performance variations in natural monopoly markets. The investigation is based on financial and technical performance data from 203 firms from 2007 and 2008, compiled by the Swedish Energy Market Inspectorate. The results strongly indicate that private firms are more profitable than firms owned, fully or partly, by local government. Furthermore, the results find that higher profitability tends to be positively correlated with prices, rather than negatively with costs of production. The results speak in favor of private ownership under regulation, rather than the current mixture of public and unregulated private ownership.

Environment has become a major concern for society, which awareness of the importance of an environmentally respectful development has been growing during the last decades. Economic reasons have encompassed this transition to a more planet friendly conception of human development. In fact, this transition has been parallel to the growing prices of fossil fuels, facing a clear perspective of a shortage on its availability, insufficient to cope with a growing demand in the near future. Within this context, the role of renewable energies in order to stop depending on fossil fuels and to reduce greenhouse gases emissions has become crucial.   Because of its climate, heating represents a major source of energy consumption in Sweden, accounting for almost 60% of the residential and services sector energy use. Maximizing the efficiency of heating systems and using renewable, environmentally friendly and economically sustainable sources of energy may have an enormous impact on both environment and economy.   In this thesis the use of district heating and ground heat pump for a multi-dwelling building is evaluated, both from the economic and environmental points of view. Both are recognized to be efficient heating systems, allowing important savings of other sources of energy, and respectful with the environment.   An installation combining both district heating and ground heat pump, for a multi-dwelling building in Gävle has been analyzed. Different scenarios have been considered, and results obtained show that when installing a ground heat pump, both economic savings and CO2 emissions reduction are obtained. Annual economic savings account for 16,8% when providing 60% of the thermal energy with the ground heat pump, and considering the investment associated to the recent installation of a new heat pump (in the case studied, boreholes were already drilled), the payback time is 7,4 years. CO2 emissions reduction for a normal year reaches 34%. However, if we look at the wider picture of electricity and heat production from a community (local, regional, national or even international) point of view, several considerations have to be taken into account, which are discussed in the report.