Industrial waste heat district-heating design based on geographic information system: Case study in vitoria-gasteiz (Spain)

The use of georeferenced information system and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data in combination with traditional data analytics tools is very promising in urban scale engineering and especially in energy urban planning. This paper explores the use of new DH networks for industrial waste heat exploitation and for that purpose, a case-study in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain) is proposed. The methodology explained in this paper explores the incorporation of data from industrial emplacements, buildings and road network in order to identify optimal areas in the city for the construction of a new district-heating network. An area of influence of a buffer of radius 1.5km from the industry location is defined and the proposed algorithm divides this area into grids of different sizes. The path for the network is calculated by optimizing the economic performance of the network. The results show that the district-heating may be built in the south-west direction from the industry and among the 40 configurations studied, payback periods from 6 to 8.5 years are obtained.