District Heating in Slough

Abstract: District heating through the Swedish model has proven to be an environmental and financially beneficial solution for heating. By reusing energy resources that normally would be wasted con-tributes district heating in an effective way to the society’s energy consumption. Today district heating stands for more than fifty percent of the heat supply to the Swedish residential and service sector buildings. The long tradition in the area has generated knowledge and experiences that to-day are applicable to other countries that are looking for more environmental conscious heating alternatives. The goal and purpose with this thesis has been to use the Swedish knowledge gained in district heating and apply them in United Kingdom, where district heating currently comprise a low pro-portion of the total energy supply. Through an analytical method, the effective width (ground area/trench length) has been calculated for several city districts in Halmstad and Göteborg. This material has been used to decide the distribution costs depending on different charicaristic num-bers and by so the capital cost for district heat distribution has been estimated for some selected city districts in Slough, United Kingdom. The result indicates that the effective width can be constant, although this cannot be verified due to possible noice in the data. The capital cost for Slough has shown being slightly higher than the estimated capital cost in the Swedish city districts. During the work of this thesis, differences in the residential living structure in respective country have been identified, which can be a contrib-uting explaination to the higher capital cost in Slough. Though the results still supports the in-crease in usage of district heating in United Kingdom, if low cost heat is available.