Advanced spatio-temporal source–demand matching for practical waste heat utilization in district heating

Abstract

Waste heat is widely recognized as a key lever for advancing climate neutrality in urban heating systems. While recent policy regulations have significantly improved the transparency of waste heat potentials, the gap between reported theoretical potentials and their practical usability remains insufficiently explored. This study develops a novel residual-aware, guided source–demand allocation approach, leveraging officially reported, technically detailed waste heat source information and high-resolution building typology data to reveal key insights into spatial and technical utilization potentials and limitations. The results also derive key distributional and operational source characteristics, combined with spatial and typological building patterns, considering three refurbishment scenarios. The proposed methodology provides a transparent and policy-relevant tool for translating reported waste heat potentials into actionable planning insights. The results indicate that the utilizable share of the reported waste heat potential is reduced to approximately 35 % due to techno-spatial constraints, decreasing further to approximately 24 % when temporal source–demand coincidence is additionally considered. Depending on building refurbishment progress, the number of potentially supplied buildings ranges from 1.8 to 5.7 million. Overall, these findings demonstrate that coordinated spatio-temporal planning, combined with efficiency measures, is essential to unlock the significant, yet primarily spatially constrained, waste heat potential.