This report provides Transforma Insights’ view on the use of IoT to support Community Heating. Community Heating (CH) involves generating heat in a centralised location and then distributing the heat across businesses, residences and industry. Community heating is most common in colder countries, particularly the Nordic countries, China, Russia, and some parts of North America. Some of the prominent advantages of community heating solutions are energy saving, reduced carbon emissions, and improved load balancing when compared to traditional heating solutions. The market for community heating has been backed by several government initiatives and schemes that support its deployment not only because of the environmental benefits it provides in densely populated areas but also as a method for encouraging employment due to the need for considerable infrastructure investment.
Community heating and cooling systems are gaining traction, yet their deployment is still far behind individual solutions. This is because of several disadvantages including lack of scalability in less densely populated areas, billing complexities, irregular heat distribution, lack of user control, and issues such as overheating in less sophisticated systems.
To improve efficiency, CH systems are increasingly using smart heat meters to measure consumption, detect faults remotely, support load balancing, and help to reduce carbon emissions.
The report provides a detailed definition of the sector, analysis of market development and profiles of the key vendors in the space. It also provides a summary of the current status of adoption and Transforma Insights’ ten-year forecasts for the market. A full set of forecast data, including country-level forecasts, sector break-downs and public/private network splits, is available through the IoT Forecast tool.
The report examines key factors that are influencing the development of the community heating market, including:
As the heading points out, this section of the report first defines community heating and then discusses its evolution and increasing adoption in colder and more developed regions, such as the US, China, and Japan.
It then shifts its focus to the current categorisation of CH systems as third-generation ones. It discusses the features of such third-generation CH systems, explains their features (like improvements in grid insulation), and also explains how they differ from fourth-generation ones. This section ends with a passing comment about the current development of fifth-generation CH solutions and their benefits.
This section primarily focuses on utility providers, who are reluctant to adopt these solutions, mostly because utility providers are conservative organisations and apt implementation of smart community heating solutions requires joint efforts from technology suppliers, community heating service providers, asset owners, manufacturers, and government officials. It also charts the downsides of CH systems, like high infrastructure costs with extensive installation and maintenance requirements.
This section of the report primarily focuses on the use of smart heat meters by utilities and discusses the features of these meters (like remote meter readings and real-time data monitoring) and their benefits (like detecting losses in the distribution network).
It then talks about how AMR (Automatic Meter Reading) meters are used in most operational metering deployments, and explains how AMR technology works and how it differs from AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) meters.
This section first explains the benefits of smart grids over their traditional counterparts (like remote monitoring and improving the stability of grid systems). It then discusses how grid and meter data can be integrated to forecast consumer demand.
Reducing carbon emissions and energy security
This section first focuses on community heating as an effective way of reducing carbon emissions and explains how natural gas is one of the most common energy resources for heating and its associated environmental benefits. For instance, the Hungarian government estimated that converting 45,000 gas-fired households to district heating can reduce yearly CO2 emissions by 67,000 tonnes and other pollutants by 80 tonnes. It also discusses the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia as one of the reasons encouraging the adoption of CH as an important tool in reducing dependence on imported gas.
This section of the report explains that since the supply of renewable energy sources, utilities and governments that rely heavily on renewable sources will look for alternatives that allow them to influence demand in response to changes in supply, reiterating the importance of modern CH systems.
This section talks about how many companies have started using the huge amount of heat generated from their data centres to heat adjacent buildings and towns. For instance, Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle uses the heat generated from its data centres to heat the adjacent three buildings.
This section talks about the increasing usage of geothermal heat pumps, especially in the European region. It also mentions the deployment of geothermal heating systems in the US and the US government’s investment plans for three more projects in the states of Oregon, California, and Utah.
This section of the report explains how governments and local authorities are the main drivers of district heating and cooling solutions around the world. In a tabular format, it then charts the district heating schemes and policies in countries and regions including China, the European Union, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, Austria, Finland, Ukraine, and the US.
This section charts the communication technology used in heat meters. It explains why relying on a local network (like Wi-Fi) or public networks is not a viable option for CH systems and how the concentration of CH deployments encourages private or city-wide LPWA networks and discusses the benefits and challenges of such private networks.
The final section of the ‘Market development’ segment of the report provides some examples of relevant IoT deployments in this application, including Enercity in Hanover deploying Danfoss’ Leanheat solution for temperature and peak load control across homes in Ostland.
The key vendors section lists some of the main providers of products and services related to the community heating market, such as Danfoss, Veolia, Vattenfall, State Power Investment Corporation, Vital Energi, Cetetherm, Landis+Gyr, and Engie SA. The report provides profiles of the various vendors including aspects most relevant to this Application Group, such as product offerings, pricing, financial results, and technology.
In the market forecasts section, we provide a summary of the Community Heating Application Group forecasts from the Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database:
The report charts the growth in the number devices, which will grow from 29.3 million in 2024 to 85.4 million in 2034.
Transforma Insights forecasts are compiled on a country-by-country basis. This report includes a regional summary, showing splits between Australasia, Greater China, North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America, MENA, Russia & Central Asia, South East Asia, South Korea, India & South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Transforma Insights’ IoT forecasts include splits between the various connectivity technologies as follows: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mMTC, 5G non-mMTC, LPWA (non-mMTC), Satellite, Short Range, and Other.
This section discusses which technologies will be used in the Community Heating Application Group.
This part of the report discusses the market growth in terms of revenue (module revenue, service wrap revenue, and VAC revenue). Transforma Insights estimates that the revenue in the Community Heating Application Group will grow at a CAGR of 14%.
