Alfred Heller, Civil engineer, PhD, Chief Consulting Engineer, NIRAS A/S, Denmark
HEATman is leading the digital agenda for the district heating sector. HEATman is a cooperation between private and public partners. The goal is an integrated and adaptable product platform for district heating companies. This open IT-platform is hosting a variety of data and different software tools. By combining these resources, new solutions are developed, and new values generated. The most promising tool is a cross-system optimisation for a data-intelligent holistic control. HEATman is a toolbox and Swiss Army Knife for the district heating organisations. This knife consists of simple tools by single providers, and advanced solutions that combine individual tools from different providers to a common service. Enabling the monitoring of technical components is an example of a simple tool. More advanced is the standardized data collection solutions that open the internal IT of district heating plants to a secure cloud. Hereby, external services can support the organisation and the advanced solutions be developed. The most advanced tool is probably the solution that combines a number of individual software that optimize each their separate part of the overall district heating system. This cross- system intelligence is further refined by models that are based on data collected across the whole system.
Missing research pieces will be carried out by the Technical University of Denmark and the Aarhus University as a part of the common activities. The HEATman project can celebrate its 1st anniversary and the support from The Innovation Fund of Denmark . The Project consortium has 20 entities including private companies, public entities, universities, and the Danish District Heating Association. These partners bring in their skills from every angle of district heating, cooperation, technology, data, research, and business. From best practice to next generation digital district heating Three district heating companies, Bronderslev Forsyning, Hillerod Varme and Trefor enable collection of experience and build “living labs” for the HEATman developments. To be able to document the impact of HEATman, a baseline is established in autumn 2019 for the three plants. After the installation of state of art tools and software, a second performance is collected to be compared with the baseline. Hereby the project is able to document the overall impact of all improvements at the end of the project for the three living labs. During 2019, the three living labs were prepared to be able to host the activities in HEATman. In this, all digital components and methods at the plants were revised and adjusted, leading to savings in unnecessary licenses and software, more consolidated data streams and other improvements. This was one digital service that was not expected to be valuable. NIRAS will promote this service under the term “consolidation”. First new HEATman solutions will already be visible during 2020. More advanced solutions will be developed during 2020 and 2021 to be demonstrated during winter 2021. Hence, mature advanced solutions will be promoted during 2022,
SOLUTIONS AND TOOLS FROM HEATMAN: • Digitalization of district heating - and technical components • Cloudification • Cross-system optimization • Data-intelligent optimization methodology • Building integration approaches • District heating – electricity-marked models and bidding tool • IoT and metering for district heating
where the innovation pro-ject supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark will end in February 2022.
THE PROJECT PARTNERS: • NIRAS (Leader of the project) • Dansk Fjernvarme • Brønderslev Forsyning • Trefor Varme • Hillerød Varme
• Short- and long-term planning • Screening of potential districts • Baselining of existing DH
About HEATman The lead consultant company, NIRAS, was the initiator of another project for the water utility sector, called LEAKman (LEAKman). A few partners involved in this project saw similarities between the water and district heating sectors. In a parallel series of research-based innovation projects, a number of solutions were made ready for implementations. The solutions originate especially from CITIES, Smart Cities Accellerator and Energy Lab Nordhavn. HEATman takes this opportunity up and will implement an extensive backlog of results from these former research projects.
• Danfoss • Logstor • Kamstrup • EMD International • ENFOR • Neogrid Technologies • NorthQ • Leanheat • DESMI • Technical University of Denmark • Aarhus University.w
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