Energy Policycast

Financing district heating - methods used in the FinDH project

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:01:14 +0200

In this special episode of Energy Policycast, we give a taste of the methods used in the FinDH project - an IEA DHC Annex XIV-supported research project focused on financing of district heating projects.

Professor Urban Persson/Halmstad University, Dr. Luis Sanchez-Garcia/now Hofor, Drs. Kenneth Karlsson and Kristoffer Andersen/Energy Modelling Lab, and model expert Till Ben Brahim discuss methods with project leader Daniel Sneum.

FinDH publications

One-page summary

Summary report for non-technical audiences

Access the full report through IEA DHC

Financing district heating - results from the FinDH project

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:46:24 +0200

In this special episode of Energy Policycast, we give a taste of the results of the FinDH project - an IEA DHC Annex XIV-supported research project focused on financing of district heating projects.

Professors Kristina Lygnerud/Lund University and Tobias Popovic/HFT Stuttgart discuss the project results with project leader Daniel Sneum.

FinDH publications

One-page summary

Summary report for non-technical audiences

Access the full report through IEA DHC

Financing district heating - FinDH season teaser

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0200

Energy Policycast's new season explores financing of district heating in the FinDH project.

Subscribe here to follow the results being published in 2025.

The IEA DHC-supported project brings together researchers and experts from Energy Modelling Lab/Denmark, Euroheat & Power/Belgium, Halmstad University/Sweden, Lund University/Sweden and Steinbeis Transfer Center Sustainable Finance and Management/Germany.

IEA DHC: https://www.iea-dhc.org/the-research/annexes/annex-xiv/annex-xiv-project-03

Project website: https://www.euroheat.org/dhc/eu-projects/findh

Project lead: Daniel Møller Sneum/Energy Modelling Lab and Lund University daniel@energymodellinglab.com

LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8167401/

The podcasts and contents presented here are not official IEA DHC communication, but solely the responsibility of the project partners behind the FinDH project, based in the desire to share results.

40 barriers to flexibility – and how to solve them

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 10:55:50 +0200

“Anything that exists is possible” as Boulding’s first law prescribes. I was wondering why, in some places of the world, district energy systems were very flexibly integrated with the electricity system – while in other parts, they were not. So I set out to explore the existence of flexible sector coupling.

This resulted in the study that is the focus of today’s episode.

Anyone working with sector coupling and flexibility may benefit from listening in – if they can bear a 30-minute talk by me. Or else, dig directly into the resources referenced below.

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Scientific paper - Barriers to flexibility in the district energy-electricity system interface – A taxonomy

Policy brief – Barriers to flexibility

Interactive version – Play around at your own pace

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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder is highly recommendable, and has recently hosted an episode with me as a guest (the upside is TWO middle-aged men chatting, instead of just ONE in this episode…). So give it a listen as well!

The FlexSUS project has received funding in the framework of the joint programming initiative ERA-Net Smart Energy Systems’ focus initiative Integrated, Regional Energy Systems, with support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 775970.

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome @DistrictEnergyD.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

How to fully decarbonise the Nordics

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 07:00:00 +0200

A world premiere for your ears!

Nordic Clean Energy Scenarios by Nordic Energy Research is the most comprehensive study of decarbonisation of the Nordics so far – out 7 September 2021.

Energy Policycast is lucky enough to host two of the main authors, Klaus Skytte (CEO, Nordic Energy Research) and Kenneth Karlsson (CEO, Energy Modelling Lab and Senior Project Manager, Swedish Research Institute).

The study explores solution tracks to carbon neutral Nordics through 2030 and onwards to 2050. These tracks include electrification, power-to-X, bioenergy, carbon capture technologies in combination with bioenergy and behavioural change.

See the full study here: Nordic Clean Energy Scenarios

In the Peer Review section, Klaus recommends the study Renewable energy in the Nordics – state of the art of renewable targets in the Nordics and the Nordic Talks podcast. Additionally, The Nordic Energy Challenge 2021 is coming up in September 2021.

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Bonus: Sounds of energy

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 11:40:27 +0200

Our music and jingles are based in energy technologies - see for yourself in this short clip.

Best wishes for the summer!

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Crowdsourced scenicness and acceptance of wind power

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 10:58:29 +0200

How does the beauty of the landscape, i.e. scenicness, play into the deployment of wind power? And how can we measure scenicness?

Those questions are addressed by Professor Russell McKenna and his co-authors in the study Quantifying the trade-off between cost-efficiency and public acceptance for onshore wind (working paper) and journal paper Scenicness assessment of onshore wind sites with geotagged photographs and impacts on approval and cost-efficiency.

Inspired by the Economist article Computer analysis of what is scenic may help town planners, the researchers applied the scenicness dataset ScenicOrNot to evaluate wind deployment in landscapes.

During the interview, we discuss Pablo Hevia-Koch's PhD thesis on acceptance costs. The Peer Review section discusses the study How much wind power potential does Europe have? Examining European wind power potential with an enhanced socio-technical atlas. And the comment to this from McKenna et al.: On the socio-technical potential for onshore wind in Europe: A response to Enevoldsen et al. Also, the response by Enevoldsen et al.

The study was authored by Russell McKenna of University of Aberdeen, previously Technical University of Denmark. Jann Weinand of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Ismir Mulalić of Copenhagen Business School, Stefan Petrović of Danish Energy Agency, previously Technical University of Denmark, Kai Mainzer of greenventory, and Tobias Preis and Helen Susannah Moat, both of Warwick Business School and The Alan Turing Institute.

The hidden sides of wind repowering

Tue, 25 May 2021 09:01:48 +0200

What happens when old wind projects are replaced with new capacity? Associate professor Lena Kitzing from DTU Wind Energy discuss her recent study - Multifaceted drivers for onshore wind energy repowering and their implications for energy transition - showing previously unknown aspects of repowering. Also worth reading is the affiliated policy brief Multifaceted political and social drivers inform wind energy repowering decisions and potential.

The study was inspired by discussions in IEA's Task 26 on wind and co-authored by Morten Kofoed Jensen/Aegir Insights, Thomas Telsnig/JRC and Eric Lantz/NREL.

In the Peer Review section, we discuss The 7 habits of Highly Effective People.

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Importing waste: Good idea in a regional perspective?

Tue, 11 May 2021 14:08:13 +0200

What should we do with waste - dump it nationally or ship across borders to burn? Does it make sense economically - and how about climate? This rare and very interesting topic is discussed by PhD Amalia Alonzo and Professor Marie Münster, based in their two studies The climate footprint of imports of combustible waste in systems with high shares of district heating and variable renewable energy and The economic value of imports of combustible waste in systems with high shares of district heating and variable renewable energy. The studies were co-authored with Ciprian Cimpan, Maria Ljunggren Söderman and Hans V. Ravn as part of the TOPWASTE project.

In the Peer Review section, Marie recommends Harry van der Weijde/University of Edinburgh's webinars on energy and Dartmouth College's: Energy seminar series.

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Data centres - big deployment with a small splash

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 13:36:35 +0200

How will various degrees of deployment of data centres impact a small country’s energy system? In this 2020-interview, Stefan Petrovic, now special advisor at the Danish Energy Agency, explains a very interesting study on Denmark by Stefan Petrović, Alessandro Colangelo, Olexandr Balyk, Chiara Delmastro, Maurizio Gargiulo, Mikkel Bosack Simonsen and Kenneth Bernard Karlsson.

And he has some unusual - but useful - recommendations in the Peer Review-section of the episode...

The study: The role of data centres in the future Danish energy system
Study on scenicness: The implications of landscape visual impact on future highly renewable power systems: a case study for Great Britain
The offshore-onshore conundrum: Preferences for wind energy considering spatial data in Denmark
Fabian Bühler’s papers
- Industrial excess heat for district heating in Denmark
- Spatiotemporal and economic analysis of industrial excess heat as a resource for district heating
Also, here's a link to a 2020-episode of The Interchange, which had an interesting discussion on data centres

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Are markets ready for biomethane?

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 16:07:13 +0100

Are markets mature for trading green gases like biomethane? Tara Amirkhizi, PhD from DTU, gives a status and describe her research within the FutureGas project on markets for biomethane.

Florence School of Regulation's taxonomy on green gases
James Buchanan: An Economic Theory of Clubs
Tara's Florence School of Regulation article Status quo of renewable gas markets in the EU
Ecofys describes the term "chain of custody": Analysis of the operation of the mass balance system and alternatives
The paper "A Journey to a common European Biomethane Market" is found in Tara's thesis: FutureGas-Markets and Regulation for Renewable Gases in an Integrated Energy System

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Citizen finance: 176 billion Euros for renewables

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 15:20:01 +0100

In today’s study, we take a look into the pockets of European citizens and find 176 BEUR of potential renewable financing. Enough to cut in half the investment gap of reaching 32% European renewable energy by 2030.

PhD researcher Cristian Pons-Seres de Brauwer from DTU Wind presents his and his colleagues' study Analysing the potential of citizen-financed community renewable energy to drive Europe's low-carbon energy transition.

Cris' study is part of the MISTRAL Project.

In the Peer Review section, Cris recommends the Volts blog by David Roberts.

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark - comments welcome.

Please rate + share with your colleagues, so we can get fresh research into new ears and brains!

Sector, vector and smart sector coupling

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 21:36:43 +0100

Get dressed for the buzz on sector coupling with professors Brian Elmegaard and Marie Münster from Technical University of Denmark.

We discuss our work on the white paper Sector Coupling: Concepts, State-of-the-art and Perspectives. The study was commissioned by the European Technology and Innovation Platforms on Smart Networks for Energy Transition - ETIP SNET.

Links to the topics discussed:

Numbers on electric storage (batteries) 8 GWh (IEA) - 12 GWh (Greentech Media). Danish pit thermal storages: 44 GWh heat (see White Paper).
IEA Technology Collaboration Programme on Heat Pumping Technologies, HPT TCP, and Heat Pump Centre
Podcasts
DTU Sector Coupling Report
FlexHeat
Daniel Møller Sneum's PhD thesis on barriers for flexibility of district energy systems
FutureGas
Living Like an Academic Athlete: How to Improve Clinical and Academic Productivity as a Gastroenterologist
The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark

Doing it right the first time: Electricity transmission (for offshore wind especially)

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 21:15:52 +0100

Which transmission architecture is the most beneficial to integrate large shares of renewable energy in the North Sea region? And what are the consequences of the planning horizon when planning such a system towards 2050?

PhD researcher Juan Gea-Bermudez from DTU Management elaborates these questions in the study Optimal generation and transmission development of the North Sea region: impact of grid architecture and planning horizon. Co-authored with Lise-Lotte Pade, Matti Juhani Koivisto and Hans V. Ravn.

We discuss the projects Promotion, Flex4RES and NSON.

Sound design by Dea Cisar.

Hosted and produced by Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division, Technical University of Denmark

Teaser: Energy Policycast is back!

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 12:10:05 +0100

After a small hiatus including finalisation of a PhD thesis and paternity leave, we're back with more informal and geeky discussions on energy policy, regulation, economics, systems and anything in between.

Stay tuned and share our podcast with you friends and colleagues.

Your host is Daniel Sneum, Sustainability Division at Technical University of Denmark - dasn@dtu.dk

Sound design: Dea Cisar

TENTRANS: Large-scale renewables = large-scale local benefits?

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:15:08 +0200

Research associate Holle Wlokas/Stellenbosch University presents her research on renewable energy in South Africa and beyond - including the TENTRANS project.

In the episode, Holle recommends this social performance podcast.

Illustration: The multi-talented Luigi Bottecchia

Host and producer: Daniel Sneum (dasn@dtu.dk)/DTU Management's Sustainability Division

AURES I & II: Increasingly popular RE auctions

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 06:08:51 +0200

Senior researcher Lena Kitzing/DTU on AURES and AURES II.

In the episode, Lena recommends the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

Illustration: The multi-talented Luigi Bottecchia

Host and producer: Daniel Sneum (dasn@dtu.dk)/DTU Management's Sustainability Division

Flex4RES: Water flushes batteries away

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 04:38:16 +0200

Flex4RES leader Klaus Skytte/DTU on results in the pipeline.

Flex4RES - Shift - Negative CO2.

Illustration: The multi-talented Luigi Bottecchia

Host and producer: Daniel Sneum (dasn@dtu.dk)/DTU Management's Sustainability Division

Policies for flexibility: A Flex4RES perspective

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 04:49:26 +0200

Prof. Peter Lund/Aalto University on the Flex4RES policy paper.

Illustration: The multi-talented Luigi Bottecchia

Host and producer: Daniel Sneum (dasn@dtu.dk)/DTU Management's Sustainability Division

PPAs: Good for the energy system – and for old ladies

Mon, 13 May 2019 17:20:36 +0200

New study on power purchase agreements by Felipe Fausto/Flex4RES.

In the episode, Felipe recommends this work on PPAs.

Illustration: The multi-talented Luigi Bottecchia

Host and producer: Daniel Sneum (dasn@dtu.dk)/DTU Management's Sustainability Division

Teaser: A research-based podcast on energy policy

Mon, 13 May 2019 15:46:47 +0200

Energy Policycast: a new podcast on energy policy research covering economics, regulation, modelling + anything in between.

Illustration: The multi-talented Luigi Bottecchia

Host and producer: Daniel Sneum (dasn@dtu.dk)/DTU Management's Sustainability Division