RES-DHC stands for a wider introduction of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) in the District Heating and Cooling (DHC) sector. The RES-DHC project addresses the manifold market uptake challenges related to the transformation of DHC systems to higher shares of RES.

The main objective of the RES-DHC project is to support the transformation of existing urban DHC systems to RES in six participating regions and thereby to derive – from these practical cases – technical and organizational solutions for such transformation processes.

A vertical pillar of the project is a close-to-market implementation process of concrete actions and measures by regional stakeholder consortia in the six regions (in AT, CH, DE, FR, IT and PL). The phases of this implementation process are 1) strategy and action planning based on local stakeholder consultation 2) an implementation phase starting already at an early stage of the project including capacity building, legal framework improvements, market support, and triggering investments in RES DHC. Technical enablers, along with RES, are also sector coupling and the use of low grade heat sources.

A key horizontal beam of the project is to organize and give transnational support to the regional stakeholder consortia. This support is provided by an international team (from Belgium and Denmark) with specific and complementary expertise and competences and coordinated by Danish experts who are also project partners. The specific actions of the RES-DHC project meet the market uptake challenges to a great extent, e.g. introduction of RES at large scale, stakeholder engagement, assessment of legal and political frameworks and of the environmental, economic and social impact of RES DHC solutions.

The project started in September 2020 and ended in August 2023.

The 15 project partners from 8 countries are:

Project coordination:
Solites – Steinbeis Research Institute for Solar and Sustainable Thermal Energy Systems (Germany)

This website gathers the results of the work of the project and provides further information on renewable energy sources in district heating and cooling.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 952873.