Analysing heating transition technology trade-offs to influence decision making of municipalities using a GIS-model
By Teun Verhagen
Examiners: Dr. B. Sprecher & Dr.ir. K.F. Mulder
The municipality of Leiden wants to have 50.000 homes disconnected from natural gas within 33 years and is actively discouraging the installation of new gas networks. The heating of a city is a huge energy sink and investment, while it’s currently dominated by fossil fuels for its production. 43% of the heat supply in the EU is sources by natural gas, and only 10% is coming from renewable resources (Connolly et al., 2016).
During this energy or heating transition it is unclear which effect some technologies have on their surroundings and the trade-offs of the stakeholders involved. In order to connect the involved stakeholders with the changing situation, ranging from the municipality to the local home-owners a multi-criteria GIS evaluation framework is developed. With this tool, the implications and preferences of policy goals can be visualised with GIS data (Gils, Cofala, Wagner, & Schöpp, 2013).
Main research question:
For the start of this research a selection of heating technologies will be made to make the basis of the model.
The municipality of Leiden has made their warmtevisie in which the technologies they want to use are described. This selection with a few add-ons will be used to make the first analysis and GIS output. The priorities linked to the technologies can be social or technical and will be linked to an indicator which can be plotted on a spatial overview.
The Merenwijk in Leiden will be researched as the case study for this project. The expected deliverable of this research will be a combination of spatial datasets which visualise synergies and trade-offs, and a GIS-model to the heating related problems. These are used to generate scenario’s for the future composition of the heating of Leiden and other municipalities.
