installations, the utilization of the building thermal mass and reliable demand forecasting of each building. With an end-to- end focus, the full potential for leveraging the flexibility of the district heating infrastructure can be unlocked. This will enable the efficient use of a wide variety of heat sources, such as data centers, supermarkets, Power-to-X, Carbon Capture, industry, wastewater treatment, and renewable sources, such as bio- mass, wind, solar thermal, or geothermal energy. This union of flexibility, efficiency, and adoption of intelligent digital tools significantly increases the resilience of the district heating infrastructure. The impact reaches far beyond the dis- trict heating systems, making the whole energy system smart- er, more efficient, and more reliable. For this reason, we are continuously digitalizing our hardware portfolio to create smart components upgraded with ad- vanced artificial intelligence (AI) based software solutions that maximize the value of information for helping utilities and building owners to make better and fact-based decisions.
Many district heating systems have taken important steps in the last decades, such as consolidating multiple local networks into one large system and operating multiple and varied heat sources instead of the traditional single-source approach. They are also transitioning from high-temperature to low-tempera- ture operation. Those steps enable efficient operation of, e.g., heat pumps for taking advantage of locally available waste energy and low-temperature renewable thermal sources and moving away from fossil fuels. While the systems are inevitably becoming vastly more complex, they are also opening an enor- mous opportunity for holistically optimizing the whole system from one end to the other. The question is how to deal with the increased complexity this transformation brings. In Danfoss, we see the solution in the extensive use of digitaization and AI throughout the entire dis- trict energy supply chain - in planning of new systems and in the extension or modernization and maintenance of existing systems. We also see the solution in the strategic location of new heat plants and in optimizing the heat generation and network operation in multi-source systems based on reliable demand forecasts. Last, but not least, we see the solution in the continuous operation parameter optimization of building
Danfoss solutions The outcome of our digitalization journey is a portfolio of soft-
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