WHAT IS THE RIGHT PRICE – FOR CONNECTING TO DH?
By Hanne Kortegaard Støchkel, Researcher and Project Development Manager, DBDH
Daniel Møller Sneum, Postdoctoral Researcher, DTU - Technical University of Denmark
The amount of money people must pay up-front to connect to district heating (DH) mat- ters. It affects the number of people who will sign-up, and it impacts the economy and risks of a DH project. In this article, we share insights from Denmark and offer advice on making a DH project more robust.
Changing the up-front payment has an effect. Several measures were developed to fix this problem, and one of the solutions was to offer a discount on the up-front pay- ment. Instead of paying up-front, the investments would be paid over many years as part of the heating bill. It would mean that a smaller portion of the investments would be covered for the DH company at the start of the project, but if more people connected, the overall economy of the project would improve.
One of the major uncertainties when developing DH in an area is whether people and companies want to connect. The economy of a DH project benefits significantly if more peo- ple connect and if they join early on. Before the energy crisis, Danish DH companies struggled to get potential customers to abandon their natural gas boilers and connect to DH instead. There was moderate interest, and it was sometimes difficult to get enough people interested simultaneously to reach a high enough connection rate for the projects to fly.
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