The nature of district heating, is the district, which means that the deployment, maintenance and use of the grid is key to our business. The deployment is essential to both expansion and maintenance.
It is too expensive to deploy district heating distribution nets.
Internally: Low density housing areas, makes district heating inefficient and unprofitable. With a scalable and reliable deployment solution, micro-grids could be accessible for houses in these areas.
Externally: home owners and dwellers whom currently are reliant on individual solutions, with the responsibilities of maintenance, investments and management that follows, further the decentralized nature of individual heating lacks the specialized and energy conserving features of (pseudo)centralizes solutions
The current solution is a highly time consuming task, of surveying, , preparation, digging, deploying and connecting pibes. Most of the tasks are non-specialized, yet time and cost heavy.
Possible future solutions:
Non surfacing excavating drilling/digging, and pibe building( eg. 3d printing, on site molding etc.)
None pibe solutions
Wireless heat transfer could be a possibility, if losses were controlled or within margins.
Lastly heat-delivery (like a milk man): Is it possible to deliver a daily dose of heat (approximately 100 kWh) heat in a container to be utilized during the day. This could remove the need for local heat production, and avoid issues which currently face the proposed model with individual heatpumps.
Unreliable
Geological differences e.g. a huge rock in the path.
Untested
Unproven
Equally cheap as current solutions. Can be both cheaper or faster.